FlyTheNest

My mother has Alzheimer's. I can't adequately describe how awful it is to witness a once vital and intelligent woman become essentially a mental vegetable over the course of a couple of years. She's become a thing, no longer a person, you can't have any kind of conversation with her because any hint of lucidity did a runner last summer. This weekend I noticed she was even struggling to read. Yet all the while she's blithely unaware of any of this because she's drugged up to the eyeballs. Which I guess is no bad thing as it stops her feeling any distress but I can't help but wonder what she'd be like without the drugs. Would she still be able to have moments of lucidity? Like remembering not just my name but my sex? Yesterday she thought I was my cousin Jill. Or would that just be cruelly clinging to the vestiges of something for your own selfish reasons leaving a mentally impaired woman aware of her own confusion and degredation?

She and my dad have 6 cats and it's those she takes most delight in and can still remember all of their names and she still understood enough to find it hilarious when I caught one of them drinking out of the toilet yesterday. So that's one thing the mass of humanity has in common with an elderly lady with a fucked up brain, cats doing funny things are the height of comedy.

As horrible a disease as cancer.

My Aunt has it. She was asking me where my dad was last time I went to see her - he died in 2001 and I tried to remind her. She broke down from learning this about her big brother and went and shut herself in the bathroom. She's 90, and is in a home specialising in people with similar conditions, and is as well looked after as can be.

_________________
Here comes another winter of long shadows and high hopes
Here comes another winter - waiting for Utopia
Waiting for Hell to freeze over

My Mum's only 68, she's fit as a proverbial fiddle as my dad and her have always walked and hiked and he's doing everything he can to keep that going. I noticed last weekend for the first time that he always kept his arm over her shoulder when we were out to keep her from wandering off.

It's a horrible thing and I'm sorry I brought it up.