After five years of watching my mother descend into the belly of dementia, I cannot get use to the behaviors that appear before me. Her descend has been slow but always noticible, at least to me.
I’ve witnessed her threats, her cursing my life, her paranoia, her screams, her nightmares, her stripping naked, her cries for help and her calling for the police. But none have the effect or rattle me as her calling out for her mother. She lost her mother well over 65 years ago, but her mind cries out for her mother to help her and comfort her as if her mother were in the next room.
Usually we medicate her to calm her, but she’s in the hospital suffering with pneumonia and cogestive heart failure and they feel she is overmedicated with what we give her at home. So here I sit, listening to the hell that she lives in, wondering, is this what it all comes to? Is this going to be my destination at some point in time. What a cruel and unusual punishment to have handed down to my mother. Had she not suffered enough before, during and after the camps?
I’m angry and I don’t know who to be angry with. I want to kick, spit, scream and cry out to give my mother her sanity back. I was never very close to her but she is my mother and I would never turn my back on my responsibility as her child. Afterall, she brought me into this world and for that, I am grateful.
If my mother can’t be “sane” and enjoy her life, then all I want for her, is to be at peace. Dementia is eating away at her like vultures and she’s dying a slow death in quicksand.
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