The truth about lying...

Have you ever told a lie?

Most people have, at one point or another in their lives. It can be useful as a form of self-preservation (Suzie, did you break Grandma’s antique china dish? No Mommy, I don’t know how that happened....) and it is also an important social tool (Hey, honey, do you think I’m too fat? No dear, you look wonderful...).

Some lies are told to others, some to ourselves. Even the most introspective person needs to lie to themselves once in a while, or facing our imperfections would become overwhelming and we’d end up rocking in a corner somewhere, wearing a hair shirt and flogging ourselves with a knotted rope. Ok, maybe not that bad, but you see what I mean.

There are a lot of people who lie to better their own positions, in work, in relationships, even to get a better place in line at the grocery store. There are people who seem to tell lies as a matter of course, to make themselves look better or maybe just because it amuses them.

I have always had trouble telling a lie. I blush and stammer and look away, sure that I will be confronted and then die a slow death of embarrassment.

But caregiving has taught me the usefulness of some lies.

For a time I took care of a wonderful elderly man who was in a nursing facility. This was a beautiful place, well laid out and clean, but the staff... not so much.

During the course of my day with Mr. Smith (there, a lie... that is not his real name) I would have occasion to interact with the other residents. There was one very sweet lady, a retired schoolteacher I will call “Mary.”

Mary’s husband had died some years before, but she was long lost in the dark woods of dementia, and didn’t remember that. She would sometimes walk around the facility, asking if anyone had seen her husband “Bill.”

“No I haven’t, Mary,” I would tell her. “Maybe he isn’t home from work yet.”

“Oh, you’re probably right!” She would say brightly, and go on about her day. She might come and ask me the same question a few minutes or an hour later, but the same answer would satisfy her.

A lie. I could tell it without the slightest stammer or averting of eyes, because in that case it was a kindness.

Sadly, the staff didn’t see it that way. They were told to “keep the residents oriented. Tell them the truth.”

So, one day I was sitting on the sofa with Mr. Smith, and Mary came running in, sobbing almost hysterically. She had asked one of the staff members if they had seen her husband, and the staff member had bluntly told her “Your husband is dead.”

Mary, thinking that she was twenty years in the past, believed that this tragedy had just happened. She curled up next to me, crying her heart out, having just lost the love of her life.

And so I told her another lie. I told her that staff member was just being cruel, that of course Bill wasn’t dead, he was at work, it was only two o’clock in the afternoon, after all. He was probably sitting in his office sipping a cup of coffee.

After some discussion as to why that staff member would be so cruel (it helped that Mary had been a schoolteacher for years, and understood the ways of bullies) she finally calmed down, and went back to wandering the facility, waiting for Bill to get home from work.

I went in search of that staff member.

It was not a lie when I told her I would come looking for her if she did such a cruel thing to Mary or any other resident again. Did I threaten her with bodily harm? Don’t be silly, I’m a caregiver, I don’t resort to violence...

I have no idea why that woman avoided me with a look of fear in her eyes thereafter (why am I blushing and averting my eyes while I write this...)

I do know, she never again told Mary that her husband was dead.

So go ahead, call me a liar. I’ll wear the label proudly if it saves a lonely old woman from grief.