Forget-Me-Not as I Mourn

Meet my mother.  This is the photo from her high school yearbook. This year she will turn 61.  I have been mourning her loss for seven years even as she still breathes.

We knew something was wrong, but we were unwilling to face facts.  We were grasping at straws; unaccepting of the truth.  Even now I am still learning how bad it really was.  My father hid the truth of my sister and I about the awfulness of the disease.

You see...My mother was diagnosed in her early 50's with early onset of Alzheimer's. But we had very little time left with the person that was my Mom.  My sister had infant twins.  I was just engaged.  My mother, who loved and adored children, would missed out on her own grandchildren.  My sister and I, who were both just starting families, worried about what was to come.  How would we take care of both parents now?  We worried  about our father, who had spent the last 25 years married to a woman who took care of him hand and foot...not because he demanded but because that is what she did.  She took care of people.  She helped out anybody and everybody in need.  And, now, she was going to be the one needed the care.  How was my Dad going to be able to handle it all?  There were so many questions and very few answers.  For a while we just pretended that nothing had changed.  But we could see the changes happening.  My mother was not the same person.  She had become less vibrant.  She barely talked.  She was timid.  She was childlike. She played well with her grandchildren...now numbered three.  But could handle very little else.  Change brought about episodes.

But things change.  Slowly she been to loss memory of how to do things like get dress, use a fork, even bath.  It took a gut wrenching decision by my Dad to put her into a nursing home...in less than two years after the diagnosis.  He was missing out on living as she was dying. It was so hard to go and see my Mother in that place.  I couldn't bring her home even though she was lucid enough to know that that place wasn't home. She would beg to go home.  The tears were hard to take.  However, in less than a two years she was completely bed ridden.  She stopped recognizing my son and husband.  My niece and nephew and brother-in-law are no longer recognized.  Then it happened...My sister and I are no longer known.  My Dad was the last to be lost in her mind.  Even though she is housed twenty miles away, he goes to see her  at  three times a week.  He doesn't stay very long.  He absolutely hates hospitals.  And I think it pains him more than any of us know, to see the love of his life down to 80 pounds and completely unaware and unknowing.

 Two years ago, my Mom waved bye to me and told me that she loved me as she blew me a kiss.  Almost a year ago, I told her that her babies were doing fine and that it was ok to home to Momma and Daddy.

I lost my Mother seven years to a very slow death.  I mourn every time I walk out of her room.  I mourn every time I see aNana with her grandchildren.  I mourn everything I am remind that I can't ask for advice from my Momma.  I mourn every time I hear that someone else Alzheimer's.