The first few years that my mom moved in with us, I stayed home. I had worked in hospitals all of my adult life, mostly full time. One of the great things about being an RN is that I could adjust my schedule to my family life, usually working my schedule around my husbands so that someone was always home with the kids. I love being a nurse and never minded going to work. Still, when we moved my mom in with us, we weren't sure how much longer she would be alive, and it seemed important to make sure she had someone with her. She was never a very social person, not one to enjoy going down to the local senior citizen center and hang out. So I became her companion. Looking back, those were the hardest years for me. I missed work. And financially it set us back dramatically as my husband was trying to build his own business at the time and our income was unreliable. We are still trying to dig out of that financial hole! But mostly it was a kind of torture that would make water boarding seem humane. There is a stage of Alzheimer's that involves constant repetition of stories and phrases, to the point where you want to beg someone to put you out of your misery! During that time my mother also went through a paranoid stage of sorts, no doubt aggravated by her slow deterioration, her inability to remember. I personally think this is the cruelest stage of Alzheimer's. That in-between stage, where the victim understands at some level that their memory is disappearing and the frustration that this creates. My mom would often have such a bewildered look on her face and she would say to me "If it weren't for you and Pat letting me stay here, I would be in a mental institution". She meant nursing home, I'm sure, but I wondered sometimes if she didn't think that she was going crazy in a sense, she literally was loosing her mind. I tried to fill my mom's days with activities I knew she enjoyed. We played cards for hours, she loved playing cards. We went thrift store shopping, she loved thrift stores. Eventually, the card games became too difficult and she lost interest in thrift stores. With each passing month, you could almost see the brain cells dying as she lost interest and ability, a slow progression downhill.Inch by inch, my mom was disappearing before my very eyes.
