There was a time when I would come home from work to find her crying.
"Why are you crying? What's wrong?.... Did something happen?"
And she would sob: "I don't know."
I think she knew that something was happening to her,.... that things were slipping way, very slowly.
And, sadly, I prayed that God would take her, because I did not want to see her crying and afraid.
In the end I started to give her own pep talks back to her.... telling her that crying would not help. Telling her that she needed to keep busy. Encouraging her to read and do word puzzles, anything to stimulate her mind. We had NO IDEA what was happening to her.
Alzheimer's is incidious that way,...it steals in when no one realizes it, and it slowly steals away the mind,... not making it's victim crazy, making them lost and afraid. And they KNOW-- they are aware that they are losing their way. Can anything be more frightening?
I had an Aunt who suffered from Alzheimer's, .... "suffered from" -that almost sounds gentle, but it's not gentle at all. They told me that she would have moments of lucidity. She would suddenly state: "I'm afraid! I don't know what is happening to me."
They lose their way. They have trouble navigating through the day. My mother would sleep.... a lot... too much. I believe that she dreamed her day,... she dreamed that she took her medicine (she did not take it),... she dreamed that she ate her lunch (she did not eat if no one was there to eat with her)....
I had the evidence,... the prescription bottles, still full, well past the time for refills... weeks past.
And no lunch was eaten,.... the yogurt was still in the fridge. It had been her habit to eat one container of yogurt for lunch, and to leave that container and spoon in the kitchen sink "to wash with the dinner dishes." I would come home and find the sink empty...the yogurt was still in the fridge.
Thinking back, over the years,... back to when she came to live at my house.... there were little episodes... There were the times when I thought, "she's just forgetful." or "She is losing some memory/confused/doing that because she is getting old. Because the little episodes do not alarm you.
The crying alarmed me, but it was one week out of twelve years,... I thought she put it behind her.... now I think that she forgot because she had Alzheimer's. It snuck in, like a thief, and a little bit at a time it took her away.....from me, from everyone and everything she cared about.
She held tight to some things. She ALWAYS knew who I was. Always! She knew her third husband's daughters. Thankfully they did keep in touch with her, and sent her cards always, or visited her. If she knew a person, if they mattered to her --then she knew them on sight.
People would call me....one of her nieces: "I visited Aunt Lil, and she saw me coming down the hall and said my name!"
.... her step-daughter: "I visited your Ma, and she knew who I was!"
They were surprised because they knew she had Alzheimer's.
This is what I know: people with Alzheimer's remember the past. At least many of them do. And if they can hold on to the here and now at all - you can ask them about the past, about their childhood, their children, their life, and they can tell you about it! It is the day to day, short term that is gone.
My mother? every 15 minutes she would ask, "What day is it?" she could not remember. But she could follow a joke and know if it was truly funny.
That was a thing though,... every 15 minutes.... because I knew for a long time that she was slipping away.... years before she went to the nursing home. I realized that she was repeating.... people came to visit at the house, and they would talk with her for about 15 or 20 minutes, and at that point she would circle the conversation back to where they had begun. Every 20 minutes.
I took her out to visit people who could not, or would not drive out to see her. I showed those people what was happening. Every 20 minutes. Every person I took her to visit saw it. Every one of them knew she was going away from us very slowly. I am thankful that those folks were able to see it, and that I did not have to explain to them where she went.
That is all of the story I can tell today.... it makes me too sad,... to go back over it again.... to remember the cruel, vile disease that stole her away.
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(What prompts me to write this now? a story about AD on a television program.)
Alzheimer's Assocation
Wikipedia -- Alzheimer's_disease
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