Tag Archives: Stuffed Animals

The Dementia Dossier: Stuffed Animals

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A pile of stuffed animals at the front door greeted me as I came downstairs for breakfast.  I have seen one of these rotating stuffed animals on Mom’s bed pillows for years.  “I want you to throw them away,” she instructed.  Okay, Mom, but what’s this all about?  “I’m just tired of them,” she kind of explained.  Apparently, but what happened to make you suddenly want them in the trash?  They’re just old, she reasoned, and she was tired of them and didn’t want them anymore.  She thought they were too dirty to donate to the Deseret Industries (DI) thrift store.  I checked with my sister to see if the stuffed animals had any historical or sentimental value.  Indeed not: Mom had herself purchased them at DI years ago for maybe a dollar each.  Waste Management will pick them up on its Monday morning run.

Little Growler

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Little Growler

A lion sits on my bed, a little lion, named Little Growler.  He clambers onto my pillow each morning after I make the bed.  Hello Little Growler, I say.  He guards the small house all day.  And he shuffles off to his secondary perch when I draw back the blankets at night.  He does not demand anything of me.  He does not growl or bark or mewl or drool.  He does not whine or glare or fume.  Little Growler came to stay when I moved away.  She brought him with her one day and introduced us.  She knew I was alone now.  She was 9.

When she turned 10, Olaf skated home with us from Disney on Ice.  He joins Little Growler with a grin that refuses to dim.  Pooh Bear with his round rumbly tumbly completes the trio, wandering in from California when the girl was not quite 2 and we met a giant Pooh and a giant Tigger and they happily squeezed in with us in a photo of the family: together.

I wave to the threesome at night – company in the dark is comforting – and manage to smile and say Good night little friends and remember Hannah at 9 and 10 and 2 and know we have had some happy times and I am not irreparable and I am very much alive and moving into something mysterious and beautiful and that Little Growler will be perched on my pillow when I come home at night.