These are difficult days, this end part of our long goodbye.  I am ready for my mom to die and I'm unprepared.  I have said goodbye to my mother years ago.  My mother left years ago.  This shell of a person is not my mother..or is she?  Does Alzheimers rob us of all our pretense and leave us with the essense of who we are, or does it rob us of our essense and leave us vacant?  The disease has robbed my mom of her ability to communicate except at the basic level, a grimace, a moan, a faint attempt at a smile.  I so wish I knew what, if anything, goes on inside what is left of her brain.  Then again, perhaps I don't really want to know.  I could be in real trouble !!!

The mother I remember was an indominable spirit.  She would set her mind of something and nothing would stop her.  Even now, I believe that essence remains.  Somehow she continues on.  She awakens every morning, allows me to get her up, walk her down the hall, bathe her, walk her downstairs, feed her, return her to her bed for a long nap, then up again for dinner, another diaper change, and back to bed.  We have this routine that rarely deviates.  She depends more and more on me, and yet it is still that spirit that puts one foot in front of the other, travels through each day on as much of her own steam as she can muster.  The human spirit.  Who we are in the center.  "You have a body that may become ill; you have a psyche that may become disturbed. But the spirit is what you are. It is your healthy core." (Joseph Fabry)   I want more than anything to believe that Alzheimer's, a horrible disease that robs us of almost everything, is incapable of robbing us of God's greatest gift, our spirit.