As Memory Fades by Justine Frost
To watch someone succumbing to Alzheimer’s, I think, is one of the most painful things to witness. Because you just see them being erased in front of your eyes, they’re getting fainter and fainter and fainter. Hazel Leventhal Dementia: The Forgotten Disease
My mother is slipping away
She is present and yet not her ‘self’. All that makes her ‘her’ is passing into darkness.
Her ability to communicate is leaving her, her self-expression reduced to ‘yes’ and ‘no’
The connections in her mind – the links that deliver up her memories are breaking up. Things are becoming lost to her words, places, people, objects
Fragments of her life drop away. The strain is evident as they fall from her reach. She grasps the air for them but they are gone.
Appointments are missed, the dates, times and places blurred and unclear to her. Her diary her only hold on the day to day events in her life.
Her reality has shifted, her perspective changed, the familiar becoming unfamiliar. Her worries become realities, her fractured mind shifting the world into a place to be feared. She is losing her grasp on what is true, on what is real.
Absence permeates her house. It no longer feels like a home. Her spirit, the warmth and joy that filled it, is fading.
Clothes hang like memoirs of a life that was.
Her home has become frightening – no longer the sanctuary it was. She is afraid. She cannot cope alone.
The fight has left her. She succumbs to our care.
A fall, a fractured pelvis ‌. pain, fear, confusion, despair.
The decision so hard to make. The guilt, the despair, the finality of it. The home provides genuine care, from the heart and they are able to meet her needs better than we can but still in our hearts we feel we are letting her down, failing her.
Dementia causes a progressive deterioration in memory, thinking, behaviour and the ability to perform everyday activities. There are 850,000 people with dementia in the UK, with numbers set to rise to over 1 million by 2025 and 2 million by 2051. Worldwide it affects 47.5 million people worldwide with 7.7 million new cases every year.
The following organisations offer support and advice on Alzheimer’s and Dementia: Alzheimer’s Society www.alzheimers.org.uk Dementia UK www.dementiauk.org Age UK www.ageuk.org.uk