May 19, 2023
“We do not remember days, we remember moments.”
– Cesare Pavese
Some loss is a long time coming.
After ten years, Joe’s mother was re-diagnosed with cancer, and it spread to her bones. The doctors gave her six months to live. But God had other plans. She lived six more years, and Alzheimer’s set in.
It was apparent she was declining and the dementia was getting worse. There were the usual signs — she forgot a boiling pot on the stove, she couldn’t remember where she parked her car, and she would have an outburst when someone asked her a question and she struggled to recall a person or place.
When that happened, there would be silence, followed by an emerging look of terror that transfixed her face and eventually turned into tearful frustration. She was caught in the grip of Alzheimer’s.
For Joe, it really hit home the afternoon they were going through a photo album to keep her mind attentive, and they came upon a family picture of him and his parents. She paused and studied it and then said hesitantly, “That’s me … that’s Daddy … but who’s that?”
“It’s me, Mom. It’s me,” he told her.
As the situation got worse, he felt a preview of grief and loss that was more intense with each passing day. Two years later, she died. It had been a slow descent into oblivion.
This is called “anticipatory grief,” and it often afflicts those who care for loved ones suffering dementia. It is accompanied by the same emotional pain associated with grief. There is a premature sense of loss. Your good-bye is prolonged, but inevitable because the disease is incurable and progressive.
Researchers in Indianapolis found that more than 80 percent of caregivers, when they were asked, “What is the biggest barrier you face as a caregiver?” responded it was “the loss of the person they used to know.”
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Live for the moment, not the future.