Hearing, Yes or No?

It is too late for my dear wife as she left us a few weeks ago. As I often sit and think back over our path down the difficult road of AD, things pop into my head that I wish I had known or at least considered at the start. One of those topics is the subject of how much the suffering person can hear and also understand, especially in the later stages. As our loved one loses the ability to communicate in the normal ways, we are required to learn how to communicate with them in their world, whether that be signs, facial expressions, behaviors, etc. Their hearing is supposed to be the last to go, but their ability to communicate verbally may have left much earlier. I found that this seemed to cause others, including nurses, to speak more openly about the condition in the presence of the loved one, assuming they could not understand. I want to caution anyone walking along this path of caregiving a loved one to be cautious. Over the course of my wife's path and I realized late, i now believe that the loved one does hear and, to some degree, maybe completely, understand what is said. As I look back, I now recall several circumstances when a conversation had taken place in the presence of my wife, assuming a lack of understanding on her part, only to shortly after have her repeat some part of the conversation back to me, often in a question. There were occasions when I would discuss making a change to something for her safety or to prevent her access, and then find her changing her behavior to remove the need. I now fear that she heard discussions about her disease and details she never needed to know which may have been understood at some level. I will close with the last occasion. A week prior to her passing she became soiled requiring me to clean her. It was quite difficult as she was more weak, unable to stand reliably alone and quite unhappy with what I had to do. In the course of this I became frustrated and struggled to complete the task. Finished, I helped her back to her seat on the sofa. She then gently took both my hands in hers, looked into my eyes with an angelic face and said" You are not going to put me somewhere are you?" That was a stab into my heart. I started crying and reassured her I would not, not knowing why she asked this at that time. I then realized that in the midst of the struggle cleaning her up, I said out loud, but I thought to myself "I don't know how much longer I can do this". Some will argue her question following this experience is just coincidence and they two things are not related. I would ask them "Exactly how you do you know that for sure?" I encourage you to be cautious, don't assume anything about things which we cannot measure or confirm and be sensitive to your loved one at all times. Better safe than sorry. You do not want to experience your loved one playing back to you something said with the assumption they cannot hear or understand. It is a stab into your heart from which you may never recover.