You cannot force this disease into submission, no matter how much anger your exhaustion riles after another sleepless night. Or if there was sleep, it came in choppy waves of fitful delusions…
It is hard to describe the early days of an Alzheimer’s sentence. A gentle fog rolls in and lingers for a while, deepening ever so gradually until one day you wake in…
The day program driver is delivering Dad home. I watch from the picture window as they round the corner toward our driveway. The car is still rolling as Dad unfastens his safety…
Many hours will pass before she arrives home, but already he is preparing. “What are you looking for Dad?” I ask, when I find him on his knees in the hallway rummaging through…
Back in May 2013, 3 years after my parents were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, my siblings and I decided to trial a month-long respite stay for both of them at a local memory care facility.…
I lay a gentle hand on her shoulder. It’s nearly 11 am and she’s still tucked under last night’s covers. “Momma,” I say, then I stroke the hair falling soft across her…
We pull up to the market, though I do not expect her to understand this. Any of this. That we have arrived somewhere – the grocery store. That such arriving implies something…
Before my father’s Alzheimer’s stole half his lifetime of memories, his favorite story to tell was about the day we met our beautiful Beleza. We had already picked out a name for…
The house is quiet but for the spring birds singing above the distant and continuous sigh of the highway. Momma’s bedroom door is ajar and I enter to find her lying so…
I have often described myself, the dementia-world caregiver, to be “living within dying,” though I wonder now whether it is truly possible to both come and go from existence at the same…
