SpaceAgeSage

The pain is so strong, but always buried deep. It’s not like being cut with a knife. It’s like feeling my soul and spirit slowly being fed into a meat grinder. I feel trapped, but escape is not an option. Love makes me stay despite the pain.

My mother suffers from Alzheimer’s and her short-term memory is fading fast. I have coped well so far with it, but I also buried my emotions to avoid the horror, the reality of what is happening.

Sure, I have grown used to answering questions over and over and over again. I have learned to make light of when she tries to use the TV remote as a phone. I have even learned not to cry when I see that more frequent vacant look filling her once powerfully alive eyes.

Emotional coffin
But I just watched a video that ripped the lid off my emotional coffin where I bury my real hurts. The speaker said caregivers like myself experience day by day losses without knowing how to grieve and mourn over them because there is no ritual to follow. A funeral is a ritual that allows expression of sadness, closure, and even celebration of a person’s life. Alzheimer’s is so gradual and the losses so slow that caregivers often bear the horrible weight alone.

The losses in Alzheimer’s are losses of personality. My mom’s motivation, memory, and mental toughness fade more every day. This is a woman who could out-hike me in the mountains of Aspen when I was in high school. This is a woman who could whip up food for any gathering and make everyone feel welcome. This is a woman who could ride a horse better than any cowboy and manage five kids after her husband died. All that is gone.

Gone, but still here
Now, my mom can’t even handle the decision making required from choice selection on a menu. I will have to lock up all the household chemicals this week because she can’t comprehend the labels anymore. I have found the dishwasher overflowing with bubbles several times because she used dish soap instead of dish washing soap. Gone is real conversation, mutual decision making, or any emotional support from her as a mother.

In many ways, she has become child-like, but children grow and learn. My mother will never improve in her cognitive skills. In some ways, it is like other illnesses, but this one has no hope of recovery, only the expectation of increasing decline. She is physically present and healthy (thank God), but she isn’t present psychologically as I remember her.

Do you understand now? The meat grinder rips at me daily, because no matter what I do and no matter that she lives with my husband and me, I will never have my mother back.

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The speaker on the video I mention is Sandy Braff, co-author of Staying Connected While Letting Go: The Paradox of Alzheimer’s Caregiving.

Tags: Alzheimer's, care taking, caregivers, finding sagehood, parents