“There” was still a puzzle.  Through the moves from the assisted living apartment to assisted living memory care to the nursing home, we’d continued looking for the other room that was exactly like his room down to the last detail.  But we had a new problem.  The nursing home had a noun in its name that had no connection to the setting – think of “Meadows” or “Forest” in the name of a building on a stretch of grass between buildings.

“Where are the meadows?” David would ask.  “How do I get to the meadows?” 

“Well, that’s confusing,” I’d say. “There aren’t any meadows.  ‘The Meadows’ is just a fancy name to make the place sound more attractive.” 

“But I’m supposed to be at the meadows.  How will I get there?”

“I’m in charge of transportation.  I’ll drive you to the building called The Meadows, and someone will meet us at the door and go with you to your assigned room, so you’ll be right where you’re supposed to be.” 

That settled nothing.  For months and months, when I drove him back from my house or a doctor’s appointment, when I’d call in the mornings, David would ask me how to get to the meadows. 

Another doubling had emerged.  David often thought that Fiona had been in the building and that she was in trouble.  The kind of trouble varied, but the same fear underpinned every report: she had gotten mixed up with the wrong people.  She was involved in a drug deal or a scam.  I guessed that this was a variant of Capgras Syndrome, a fairly common development in LBD.  People with Capgras Syndrome think someone close to them has been replaced by an identical imposter.  Oh, that’s Fake Fiona, I’d tell him.  Real Fiona is in Brooklyn, and I talked to her yesterday.  Work is going well, and she’s trying a new curry recipe for dinner tonight.   News about the real Fiona usually eased David’s anxiety for a time, but Fake Fiona always got up to new and troubling mischief. 

I sometimes got surprising news about myself.  David was hurt because I hadn’t told him I was pregnant.  (I was 62.  Chemo had sped me through menopause, so I was decisively past my childbearing years.)  He said he’d heard from someone else, not from me, that I was moving to another state with my lover.  He asked: why hadn’t I told him I was adopting a baby?  He was very sad because I had died. 

While improv was my usual strategy for responding to hallucinations, “yes, and” seemed like a terrible way to respond to these reports.  I’d say: I bet somebody around here heard about a pregnancy and got mixed up about who is pregnant.  I promise you, it’s not me.  I don’t think the cat would welcome a baby, do you?  Or: You’re here, and I want to keep coming to see you, so I’m not moving anywhere.  Or: Luckily, as you see, I didn’t die.  I am entirely fine.

David still believed often that he was in trouble.  Somebody had made a big mistake at work and everybody thought he was responsible.  He was being investigated for embezzlement.  He was suspected of committing a murder, and the police were on their way to question him.  I said that both the police and the bosses were legally required to inform me in writing about any problems like that, and I hadn’t received any documents.  I’d checked the file that very morning.  I’ll let you know if I receive documents about any investigation, I assured him, but I suspect that someone has given you inaccurate information.  (It helped to use a lot of syllables – the more Latinate, the better.)

When David wasn’t the suspect, he was the intended victim.  He told me many times that “the people there” were planning to kill him.  He said they’d told him that.  Was it a hallucination?  A dream?  Had he seen a threat on tv and read himself into the plot?  Had a troubled resident threatened him?  I’d report those instances so that the nurse could chart them, but it was never possible to trace the threat back to anything observable.