34/52 - Memory
There is a lot of confusion about the similarities and differences between Alzheimer’s and Dementia. Per the Alzheimer’s Association, Dementia is a general term for symptoms like decline in memory, reasoning, or other thinking skills. Alzheimer's is a specific degenerative disease that is caused by complex brain changes following cell damage and accounts for 60-80% of dementia cases. (BTW, World Alzheimer's Day is September 21 – consider donating.)
Over the last few months, I've enjoyed Anne Lamott's columns in the Washington Post about aging. In part because she is such an incredible writer, in part because of the increasingly relevant subject matter (Yikes!). Her most recent column -- Living for the unremarkable moments – struck a particularly tender chord.
One man I know has the same devastating, angry variety of Alzheimer's that my Mom had. A dear old girlfriend has the gentle, spaced-out version, as if dementia had freed the tender prisoner all locked up since childhood. When her mind grew soft, we saw the prison bars of a lifetime collapse. I would like to put in an order, while they’re still available, for the latter.
I suppose we each have unsaid dreads about what our final days will be like. But we also have an unfounded confidence that whatever terrible stories we hear about someone else, THAT thing will never happen to us. For me, the nightmare endgame would be losing memory and/or the “devastating, angry” decline described by Anne Lamott. That fear is amplified by the vein of mental illness that ran through three of my four grandparents.
My mother-in-law Nancy was a case of the gentle slide. She always knew who we were when we visited and was always glad to see us. I'm not entirely sure whether she had Dementia or Alzheimer's or whether the difference really matters as the years pass 90. But her sweet disposition always came through.
For a time, when she asked whether we had seen her husband, Price, we would gently tell her that he had passed away. After seeing her anguish and her plea, "Why didn't anyone tell me?" we decided that a better answer might be a simple, "Not today. How about you?" Further down the road, our visits would be greeted with detailed descriptions of some long-gone people Nancy had visited with during the day, including her parents, her brother Bill, and Price. Her last words to Mary Glenn a few weeks before she died were, “I hope you know how much I’ve loved you.” A gentle slide by a gentle soul.
My Mom had a bit of a bumpier slide, reflecting a personality that, at its core, was a bit edgier than Nancy's. Some of her fantasies in her last year were doozies. At one point, she thought she had lost all of her money in the casino. We had repeated conversations that, yes, her money was safe. The interesting thing (perhaps reflecting that, at her core, she was more skilled about investments than any of us) is that she always had the amount of money right in her fantasy. A fall and a resulting bruise on her face laid the groundwork for another adventure. When a doctor who regularly checked on her asked about bruise, she didn't miss a beat. "Gunshot wound. Two thugs in the casino." Although it didn't seem so at the time, with the benefit of a couple of years of hindsight, the slide could have been a lot worse.
Per Anne Lamott:
But we have no choice in the matter. These days, all I can bank on is love. Much of the rest departs. Even our bodies shrink smaller and then smaller. Carl Sagan said about all of us, “For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.” This is doubly true for the elderly. Love emerges flagrantly as the real coin of the realm. The people I’ve spent significant time with at the end of their lives do not talk about their degrees, promotions or having successfully kept their weight down. They talk about the times and places of love. Loving memories are the fields in which we walk with them near the end.
One sweet memory of the last days of both Nancy and Sal centers around Lucy and Arlo. Lucy was born two years before Nancy died, and Arlo about a year before Sal died. No matter how many other memories had faded into the background, each ALWAYS asked about "our baby." I wonder whether either of them understood the exact parentage of these babies.
But it really didn’t matter. It was “our baby.” It always amazed me that no matter how many things they forgot and how frail they became, they knew exactly what to do when someone handed them a baby. They both understood unconditional love when they saw it. They were both mothers at their core.
A gentle glide.
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