There's Something Wrong With Omma

We weren’t prepared for my mother-in-law’s dementia—or the care that she truly needed

- Michael Harris

In the winter of 2016, we were walking in a long, deviating oval around Trout Lake, on the east side of Vancouver, and Kenny said, “I think there’s something wrong with Omma.” He sped up.

“Wrong how?” I hurried to keep pace.

We’d been together for four years at that point. He chewed his lip and squinted down at our dog padding between us. It was a gorgeous day, and there were dogs everywhere, chasing, yawping. “Did she say something?” I asked. “No. But you know how she’s been calling. A lot.”

I did know. Sometimes we woke to a dozen missed calls from Kenny’s 68-year-old mom. The week before, they’d made lunch plans, confirmed the location twice, and she still wound up waiting at the wrong restaurant. This lost quality of hers had been coming on so slowly, though, that it seemed halfway natural. Then again, my take didn’t count for much because, to me, Kenny’s mom was always a little obscured by a language barrier—her English was rudimentary and my Korean non-existent.

“Well, what are we talking about?” I asked Kenny as we turned off the path, onto the lakeshore. “Do you mean something mental? Like you think she’s got dementia?”

It was so easy, then, to throw out words like that. They had no reality to them; they referred to an imaginary crisis you read about in newspapers, saying, “Just awful; must be hell”— something that dragged down a group of poor others.