My wifes father has it...it came on him like a freight train....he seemed fine then had small bouts of forgetfulness....within a month he needed to be placed in a home and has no idea who he is or anyone else for that matter...
He was always busy and was an intelligent man...read alot and had plenty of hobbies...
Now he is in a home wearing diapers
Life can be cruel
Yes.
SOME go like that. Which, all things considered, would have preferred for my mother.
But, we play the hand we are dealt.
Mother was a stubborn, proud, often irrational woman who could be extremely demanding and abrasive while thinking she was perfectly fine to behave such ways. And that was in her “saner” moments.
With Alzheimer’s she could not do. It was buckets of grief full of sad over and over relentlessly.
But there was a poetic something to it.
She FINALLY had to just sit and receive. Her ordering and demanding were mostly stilled and didn’t matter when voiced as it was all nonsense and Dad finally had to deal with it as nonsense.
And she had to—as much as was viable at whatever levels—she finally had to accept things as they were without throwing a lot of dust in the air and making everyone around her twice as miserable as she was.
I have personal belief that our spirits are quite aware regardless of our mental faculties. And I believe that her spirit was undergoing some training and educating that she had long resisted until Alzheimer’s blunted her stubbornness and willfulness. Thankfully, I think a lot of that took. She finally had a calmness that I’d rarely seen, if ever. Yeah, the vacantness was often there. But thankfully not always and not only.
The last bit of God’s humor . . . she went to pot on the pot. She had a heart attack on the toilet.
I can imagine her laughing about that for eons to come.
How sad it is for many of us to have to see something like this happen to others in order to appreciate how wonderful life is and how lucky we are if we have our health.