We first started to notice mom wasn’t ‘right’ in 2012, eight years ago now. She was clearly forgetting and repeating things. She would forget words. Later, she would get angry. Emotional. She had always been highly strung. Could be volatile. But this was more.

We didn’t want to believe it. Had no experience with dementia up close and personal. We thought she was crazy. That she had Vitamin B12 deficiencies. That she would spontaneously get better. 

My sisters and I talked all the time trying to figure out what was wrong. We are smart, well educated women. We didn’t want to see what was in front of us. It’s easy to explain away what you don’t want to see.

Then came those fender bender accidents. After the second one, dad decided not to get the car repaired so mom couldn’t drive any more.

She became more and more forgetful and more angry. Resentful that she wasn’t able to drive and visit her grandchildren at my sister’s house three miles away.

She resisted the appointments with doctors. Resented what she perceived as her children dictating things in her life. She didn’t need any doctors. She was fine.

Then came the paranoia. The conviction that ‘they’ were coming in the house and stealing things. She wouldn’t leave the house because of ‘them,’ but she couldn’t be left alone, either.

Mom was finally diagnosed with classic Alzheimer’s. There are lots of flavors of dementia. Lewy Body. Vascular. Frontotemporal. Parkinson’s. Alzheimer’s is almost a garden variety. It’s everything described above and then some.

She can feed herself. She can use a bathroom. She still cares about her appearance, at least as it relates to her hair. She can’t abide grey hair. Thinks it makes you look old and therefore doesn’t like my greying locks and continues to get hers colored even now. She can still read, although she can read the same article in a magazine dozens of times and it’s new each time. Overall, she’s steady on her feet and robust in health.

Despite all of that, she needs supervision. Mom can’t be left to her own devices because you just don’t know what she will do. Turn on the gas stove and forget to turn it off? Wander out of the house and forget where she is? Stand on a chair to get something out of a cabinet?

She knows things aren’t right. She knows something is ‘wrong in her head.’ She says so, just like that.

It’s a slow decline. I have friends who have had parents with some variety of dementia and their decline has been quick as a wink. Diagnosis. A fast decline. Then 24/7 care at home, in a memory care facility or, finally, a nursing home. Then gone. A head injury. A hip fracture with complications. Pneumonia. Some other more merciful demon takes them away. 

I don’t want mom gone, of course. She’s my mother. But it is painful to watch. She still knows me and my sisters. I think my husband is fading in her memory. My middle sister’s husband is so-so in mom’s memory. Mom confuses her grandchildren as her own. My youngest sister has a newer partner in her life. Someone who mom didn’t know before her memory loss began. She doesn’t remember him at all. He’s a stranger every time they visit. 

Mom has good days and bad. So do we. This is our story.