Singer Kit Chan recently sat down for a chat with actress Rui En and opened up about being a caregiver to her late mother, who had battled dementia. Chan’s mum passed away in May this year.
“The only way [is to] enter their world. Because at one point, I understood how lonely it must [have been] for my mum. We are in this world, but after a while she [was in] her own world,” said Chan, 53.
Realising that her mum felt ‘trapped’, Chan decided to change how she communicated with her.
“Thanks to the fact that I was trained in drama, and the fact that I like to dream, I was the first one to really start to go into her world and I would tell her ‘tell me about it’.”
“I would just pretend that I’m in [her] world. For example if she’s saying there’s this person who’s always harassing her – at the beginning we would keep saying it’s not true, and she got really angry – I would just say ‘What an annoying person!’ and we would talk about how to deal with this person. I realised that [it was a better way to communicate with her],” explained Chan.
The singer then taught her dad and sisters the same approach and they quickly caught on.
She discovered that at times, her mum knew the things she was seeing ‘weren’t real’.
“She told me that at night, she’s in this other world where there’s a lot of fighting with swords, where everyone’s attacking her, and she needs to fight to survive,” recalled Chan.
Chan apologised to her mum for not being able to enter her ‘world’ to fight beside her. She reassured her mum that she would not die in that world, and that each morning she would return to a less frightening reality.
“At the beginning she was showing [typical signs of dementia]. You know, they get angry, they may throw things, but after we got that sorted out, and there was that trust, it totally went away. She became the sweetest person,” added Chan.
In June, a month after her mum’s passing, Chan took to Instagram to pen a post to remember her.
She wrote: “Friends ask me how I’m doing. I say I cry every day, but I also laugh every day. I think this is a good answer, and a good way to live. It would be how my mum would want me to live, just like she did. Always looking for that bright spot, catching the sparkle in the dull and mundane, and always choosing joy over sorrow.”
This story was originally published in 8Days.
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