World Alzheimer's Day

If one speaks honestly about Alzheimer’s disease and its ravages, the details aren’t pretty. Alzheimer’s changes personalities. During times of conflict, Mom and Dad drew inward, to protect each other from what they perceived as any assault. Mom fought to protect the man she’d loved all of her adult life––to defend his independence and dignity. Dad protected Mom––love-struck by his bride until her last breath.

In the midst of difficult times, I often envisioned Alzheimer’s as a silent monster looming behind Mom and Dad, inching closer and closer, threatening to over take them. Ibby and Ed saw only each other. They never acknowledged nor succumbed to the disease. They rose above it, protected by the armor of their love and faith in God. Ann and I ran frantically ahead pulling them, or behind pushing them––always trying to shield them from the invisible beast.

Father's Day Memories

My dad died peacefully in April 2011 of Alzheimer's disease, one year after my mom, both of them having been afflicted for nearly a decade. As my sister and I held his hands when his spirit left his body––I know this may sound odd––but I felt true joy knowing he was reunited and restored with my mom, neither of them suffering anymore.

In June of last year while running routine errands in the grocery store, I stopped in the card aisle, intending to buy three Father's Day cards, as I had for over thirty years––one for my husband, one for my father-in-law, and one for my dad. Unexpected, deep sadness gripped me as I realized I'd never buy him a card again.

I hope my Father's Day post reaches him in heaven.

Have any of you had a similar experience? What are your Father's Day memories?

Mother's Day Memories

...a humbling,  precious Mother's Day memory...
 

May 2, 2006

            Today a local farmer stops by my husband’s work saying he saw Dad and Mom driving on the interstate yesterday. This is after my sister and I have had many conversations with them about the safety of their driving, and they’ve finally agreed and promised us they’d drive no further than a ten-mile radius. I decide I must talk with them about this incident, so I stop by their house and visit with Mom, making small talk about the nice weather and the spring flowers blooming in the yard. I ask her what they did the day before. Mom replies they drove to the grocery ten miles away. I tell her a community member was concerned because he saw them driving on the interstate about thirty miles away.

Immediately, she grumbles, “Who told you that?” Then she defiantly says the community member was “tattling.” She yells, “We made an important trip to the mall, because I needed to buy face cream. We’re not teenagers who needed to be monitored. We’d rather lay down and die than not drive.”

She shakes her head in disgust. I ask her if she wants me to leave. She fumes, “Yes.”

            About a year later, when I was cleaning out their house, I found a sales receipt from that shopping trip for two small heart necklaces Mom had purchased for my sister and me for Mother’s Day. (Mom always gave us something for Mother’s Day.) I felt sad to think this trip, which had caused an argument, was taken to buy Ann and me something so thoughtful.

While speaking at the groundbreaking for the new memory care unit at The Western Reserve Masonic Community in Medina, Ohio, a yellow butterfly flitted across my pages. I thought of Hospice, and knew my dad, a seventy-year Mason, (and Mom too) hovered in spirit.

Book Review of SO, WHAT IS LOVE? by Ann B. Keller

Ann B. Keller pays tribute to her husband's parents, George and Patricia Keller, by writing the forward to, So, What Is Love? 

Ann’s mother-in-law, Patricia, wrote this memoir when she was in her eighties, caring for her husband George while he declined with Alzheimer’s disease for twelve years before his death. Patricia died four years later.

Patricia's writing is mushy, sugary, tender, eloquent, and vividly detailed. She briefly takes us back to her post World War II courtship with George, then through the years they raised a family, continuing through their retirement when they renovated an old Victorian home in Wellington, Ohio. The bulk of the text describes George's battle with Alzheimer’s, and how Patricia struggled to care for him.

At times the reader will wince with pain as George, at two hundred pounds, no longer recognizes Patty, a mere one hundred pounds. Thinking she’s an intruder into their home, he attacks her, and she has to call the police to subdue her own husband. You’ll gasp and be repulsed when George tries to wash his face in a public urinal. You’ll chuckle while shaking your head and moaning with sadness when Patty struggles to change George's soiled diaper in a men's restroom, while other men listening think there’s hanky-panky going on in the locked stall.

Two years ago today my sister and I held hands with our mother as she birthed her soul to heaven.