21-09-28 Tuesday I - Dementia Diaries IV

 So, last week we had fun. Mum was very concerned about some theatre tickets which were for a date in 2020, which had obviously passed. The date had been rearranged for 2021, but that date had also passed as well. She kept bringing up these tickets, and so eventually I phoned the box office and clarified that the event had been postponed *again* until July 2022. I did hope that would be the end of it, but no...

Later, she advised that she didn't actually want to go, which was actually a sensible decision in light of Dad's passing, and so I rang for a refund. Absolutely no problem, the nice lady at the box office said, I can refund the purchase to the card you used to pay. This was the Monday, I think. So I told Mum, there was no need for concern, the refund had been made, and it would be on the card. I did think that would be the end of it, but no...

Mum brought up the issue of the tickets again a couple of times, and it took me a while to figure out that as far as she was concerned, the matter wasn't closed because she didn't have the cash in her hand. I explained that the refund had been made to the card, and that she basically had free money on the credit card, in the expectation that the explanation would be sufficient. Unfortunately, it wasn't. 

To cut an even longer story slightly shorter, I ended up, on Tuesday afternoon, walking up to the shops to take £71.50 out of the cash machine so that I could give Mum the hard cash she was expecting. 

The irony was that she hadn't paid for the tickets in the first place; she may have used the credit card to buy them, but Dad had then paid the monthly bill, and so she had never been out of pocket. But she was dreadfully concerned about the refunded cash, and I've not heard it mentioned again at all in the week since I gave her the £71.50. So it seems that was an end to it. Mum doesn't use cards now, she only deals in cash, so if I had thought about it for even a fraction of a second I would have seen that giving her the cash was the best and only solution. Every day is a school day, isn't that what they say? And next time I'll know what the answer is before I'm harrassed about it ten times a day and nearly driven to a breakdown...

TTFN.