One of us can remember...kinda

Little Ruthie

I have been living with Alzheimer's officially for twelve years.  No one ever really knows when in starts, it creeps into your life slowly.  My dad died in 1991, a victim of lung cancer.  During his illness, my mom never seemed quite on top of things.  Being a nurse, I wanted details..."what did the doctor say, what stage was the cancer, are they talking surgery, chemo, radiation???"  My mom could never remember.  And after his death, she continued to seem not herself.  But she had just lost the love of her life, they had been married for 40 plus years, and it was normal to expect some period of adjustment.  We attributed much of her behavior to depression. She went through a series of moves, from Colorado to Texas, then off to Virginia, and finally landing in South Dakota at the urging of one of her sisters.  I made a point to visit her as often as I could while she was in South Dakota, marking my time until the inevitable moment when I had to admit she could not live by herself any longer.  Partly it was the multiple yellow post it notes placed about her home: "Don't forget to brush your teeth", "Turn off lights", "Mass at 8:30".  The final straw was a trip to Walmart.  My mom LOVED Walmart.  It was the second place she scouted out in every town, the first being the Catholic Church.  On my last visit to see her, she couldn't remember where the Walmart was located.  And even worse, when we left the Walmart, she couldn't remember where she had parked her car.  The tragedy of that was I am a dope concerning cars.  While my husband can tell you the make and model and year of every car he sees on the road, I'm the one who says "I'm taking the blue car to the store". The bottom line being I really didn't have much of an idea what kind of car my mom drove.  It was somewhere in the middle of the Walmart parking lot, looking for a "misplaced" car, that I realized things had to change.  I , for one, had to pay more attention to cars and parking lots....and my mom needed to move in with us.  But how to convince my mom, who had always been independent to a fault , to leave her little house in South Dakota and move to Texas into a house with three teenagers and a son-in-law that she never really got along with???