Mother's Day with Alzheimer's

Nothing crafty today, just some thoughts on spending the weekend with my 84 year old Mother who has Alzheimer's.  It is agonizing.  Momma is in the advanced stages.  She is incapable of creating a sentence or comment that can even vaguely be deciphered.  It wasn't always like this.  This total break with reality has occurred in just the last six months.  It is cruel and heartbreaking to watch a once loving, funny, happy and vibrant woman, dissolve into an incoherent human being who is so angry/belligerent.

I think I will chose not to remember this Mother's Day.

Yes, today has been wonderful with my own children.  Extraordinarily so.  To watch their own attempts at interaction with their Grandmother is both beautiful and heartbreaking.  Their gentleness and patience makes my heart swell with pride.  But it is unspeakably painful to watch my children rebuffed by my Mother's illness.  "She" loved them.  Her "illness" doesn't remember them.  And a 14 and a 16 year old are left trying to make sense out of the "confusion" that is now their Grandmother.

I get really angry when I hear, "With Alzheimer's, at least the patient doesn't suffer."  I have watched the anguish in my Momma's eyes and heard the fear in her voice over the years as she tries to make sense of the nonsense in her mind.  She IS suffering.  Maybe not physically, but the agony I see in her eyes, and now the vacant, defeated resignation that she will never come back from the abyss...it breaks my heart.

My Momma was beautiful. My Momma was smart.  My Momma was full of love.

My beautiful Momma. (taken 4 years ago)

I miss her...
and she is sitting right next to me.