When A Loved One Hass Alzheimer's

[GUBU]

I went to the nursing home to celebrate my neighbor’s birthday the other day. When she lived across the street from me, she loved herself some Rhonda and would tell everybody that I was her daughter. But my visit with her the other day almost broke my heart.

I went with her cousin and we brought a cake and candles and her favorite candy snickers bars. We sang happy birthday and she blew out the candles and we all had some cake. But she kept forgetting that it was her birthday and wondering what all the balloons and stuff were for. Then she started arguing with the cousin, insisting that she had not had any cake. The cousin reminded her that she and Rhonda had brought it for her.  Then she said “who is Rhonda?” For a moment I felt like what was the point. Why come if she can’t remember. A part of me was so miffed that I didn’t even want to hug her goodbye. But I realized that was just being mean. I knew it was the disease not her love for me making her forget. Even if she couldn’t remember, if that one little moment was all she had then I could make that one little moment a happy one.

Have any of you dealt with Alzheimer's? How did you feel trying to have a friendship with someone who no longer remembered you or kept asking the same questions no matter how many times you repeated the answer?

I sometimes think about how frustrating it must be for my friends talking to me when I can hardly hear them or smiling when I can't see their faces.  But guilt doesn't help me cope, it just makes me feel like a should do something without giving me the strength to do it.

My aunt had it for ten years before she died (and she started suffering from it at a relatively young age too), before dying from kidney failure (poly cystic kidneys, not drink). I remember going out to her about two months before she died when she was in CUH essentially waiting for a bed to come available at Marymount Hospice, and the look she gave me was heartbreaking, I'll never forget the pain and confusion in her eyes. It is a horrible thing to have happen to a loved one, Alzheimers, robbing them of their memories and their personhood. My aunt was always working, a nun who first went off to Peru to teach poor children, and then came back to Kinsale trained as a nurse and ended up running the hospital in that town for nigh on twenty years before retiring. She was always on the go, working to help her patients, find funds for the hospital, ensure it was staffed but in the end she was no more than a small child mentally, and it broke my heart. And she always looked out for me and my brother, buying us presents and ensuring that we had a good time any time we visited (for example when I was down in the hospital visiting when about six, she made a big deal about me and my brother being the first to use the lift that was recently installed there).

The worst though was about six months after her death when we were all thinking about her, and my mother talked about one incident right at the start of the Alzheimers when Mary (my aunt) rang up in a frantic state after having gotten lost driving up to visit us, something she had done a hundred times and more in the past. It was a horrible feeling realising at that point that then was probably the first real proof of Mary's Alzheimers.

Rhonda, the only thing I can say is to keep the good times in your mind, remember your neighbour for what she was when she was herself, and do your best to treat her as the same person today. It is a hard thing to witness, but it needs to be done really.