“Is your dad taking you?” My mom asked when I said I had a colonoscopy in the morning.
I was momentarily speechless. I know I am probably not supposed to but I can’t help myself. “Mom, Dad has been gone for 11 years.” My dad died in June 2013.
She was then speechless. Then said, “I don’t remember any of that. I don’t have any memory of that happening.”
She didn’t get upset but was bewildered. And said so, “I am baffled. I didn’t realize I am that far gone but guess I am then.”
There is no limit to how much I hate dementia and what it has taken from my mother. From us as her family.
Today I learned that a woman I am in a writing group with had lost her mom yesterday. Her mother had Alzheimer’s disease for several years. Gone before she was physically gone. Like my mother will be one day.
Then I got the news from a friend I have had for 42 years, who I met as we were sorority pledge sisters in college, lost her mom this morning. Another woman who has been lost in her Alzheimer’s mind for several years. This woman I knew all these years too and my heart broke for my friend and for me as someone who knew her and her late husband too. They knew my late husband, they knew us.
And yet in the end, she didn’t know me or us or her own family anymore.
I would love to see some breakthrough in the treatment of Alzheimer’s, dementia and other such cognitive diseases. I hope I see it in this life. My brothers and I try to live our lives in a very full way. We don’t want that to be our end, dementia like my mother and her 3 siblings and their parents. There is none of it on my dad’s side through several generations back that we know. I do not want to be in that state for my children and I hope I won’t. I do all I know to do to prevent it.
I am sad for my friends and their losses these past couple of days. The loss of years with their mothers. I am sad for myself and my mom. She loved my dad so much and she still does. In her mind he is at the house and she thinks she needs to get back to him. I lost him 11 years ago this June and while she’s still here, she began leaving us over 5 years now.
I will never stop hating dementia and how it has robbed us of time with the people we love. The grief began years ago and continues.
TX Travel Girl 