Forget Me Not

My grandmother has Alzheimer's disease and can’t remember stuff like how many kids she has and what she said a couple of seconds before. It's been really hard on my whole family and mostly my mom. I think about it ever night and it’s really weird being around her. Talking to my mom is out of the question.

-Anonymous


I am so sorry about your grandmother. My great grandfather was afflicted with Alzheimer’s and it was VERY difficult to see the disease take him over. What got me through it though was realizing that for my grandfather, he didn’t know anything else. He was convinced that it 1950, he forgot that his wife died of lung cancer and his sister passed away shortly after. In a way it was a blessing.

It’s never easy to see our loved ones slowly lose their sense of reality and of course your mom is going to take it hard. We never think that our parents are capable of becoming frail, we assume that they will take care of us for forever when in fact, once they grow elderly we will be taking care of them. That’s just the way life goes.

Take comfort in the fact that your grandmother has lived a long and productive life. She raised a family and was around to see her grandchildren born. That is a miraculous feat in itself.

To make things easier for yourself, maybe it would help to research the disease so you know for sure what is happening. It might also help if you made some sort of scrapbook with pictures of your grandmother and your family, then you can go through it and explain to her who everyone is.
 
XO,
JANA

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5/30/2009 7:00:00 AM
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