I am thinking of ending this blog.
I began it 6 years ago now when mom and dad were first living here with us and no longer able to live alone in LaGrange.
It has been a growing time for me. I watched my mother digress week by week with Alzheimer's Disease. At first she seemed just a bit forgetful. She would worry about dad and how he was not himself. She did not know what to do, little knowing that she herself was beginning the long journey of dementia. We all thought it was dad who was declining and were just shocked to learn that mom was worse than he was. She fought a valiant fight maintaining her positive outlook and happy, outgoing ways to the very end. It has almost been two years now since she left us all and we miss her still.
We truly had many happy times with mom and dad the first years they were at Sutter Living Center.
We went out to eat at McDonald's and shopping in the cute Ludington stores. We ate ice cream at House of Flavors and drove down along the lake front many times.
Dad has dealt with mom being gone the only way he could--he has put all those memories and love into a closet in his mind, locked the door and he never opens it. He will look at a family photograph and name all his children but never mentions mom. I will sometimes point to her and say, "Who is this?" He just doesn't answer.
He will sometimes remark,"There is Nancy( or whomever is in the picture) with her mother."
For awhile there was a very sweet lady at Sutter that reminded dad of mom and he would call her Barb and want to sit with her and hold her hand, but she has been gone now for quite some time and he has put all memory of mom away.
He is kind of lonely.
I wish I lived closer so that I could pop in every day just to say "hi".
Mom had real Alzheimer's Disease. Dad has what I would call, old age dementia. He has been so much the same year after year now. He no longer can walk or even support his own weight and is in a wheel chair. However, mentally he seems about the same. No short term memory and he lives in and out of the past and the present. He says he will be going home to LaGrange soon--he says he is ready. I know he is.
I hope this blog has been a blessing.
It is rather like an old photograph album to sit down with occasionally and reminiscence.
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