From Doubt to Knowing (My Mom’s Alzheimer’s)
I have always sympathized with “doubting Thomas” of the Bible. After all, sometimes other people’s words are not enough. Sometimes we need to see for ourselves.
After decades of struggle as a single mom I finally reach the top of my profession, only to be faced with choosing between my career and my mother’s health. My options were, my hard-earned home and stability or a new community that would better accommodate my mother’s needs, a trajectory of comfortable predictability and retirement or a completely new start with no guarantee of income, home, or support.
We lived near friends but were still alone. The truth of the matter, as I see it, is that family and friends really do love you, but few have the time or resources to give more than lip service to that love. Between a 40+ hour work week, their own nuclear family and their individual needs, most people are challenged to keep in touch, much less to offer time or emotional support. And that’s what an Alzheimer’s victim needs the most, along with understanding, and compassion. The end point of this line of reasoning is that in helping my mom I had to be prepared to walk this road alone.
Long before we moved, and while my mother still lived on her own, I noticed a lot of things weren’t right, but she saw my concern as interference. I visited her one afternoon to…
