Do you have someone close who suffers from Alzheimer’s? Take a Read, Comment on the Blog to show your Support and Share if you can Relate.
My husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s about 9 years ago. His mother had it and passed away in 1990, but back then they called it “hardening of the arties” since the patient was not getting enough oxygen to their brain. My husband was not always patient with his mother and would get really angry with her back then. Now that he has it, and realizes what it does to a person, he hates himself every day for the way he treated her. He’s not only in middle stages of this horrible disease but is suffering from depression just because it’s too late to tell her, “Mom, I’m sorry, now I understand”.
Al has always been known for his sense of humor, one of the things I fell in love with him for, but now the humor has turned to sadness and bitterness and the old Al is no more himself. He talks about waiting to die because his life wasn’t supposed to be like this now. He hates that he can’t work anymore. The disease is always there between me and him, determining how we interact with each other. It’s there between him and his mom forever. One of his sons lacks the patience to deal with it, so instead, he chooses to stay away.
“It is destroying a person’s personality, changing a beautiful marriage into a fight for its survival, and breaking a family apart.”
This is what Alzheimer’s really looks like. So now I am his caregiver, whether I wanted the job or not! This wasn’t in my plans either, I’m not trained to deal with this horrible illness, I know I don’t have a lot of patience but yet I’m forced to try to be patient every second I’m with him. Why? Because he’s my husband, the love of my life although not the man I married 42 years ago. I made a vow and when I said “in sickness and in health till death do us part”, little did I know what those words truly mean and how that phrase became so significant in our lives. Pray for strength, that’s what I do every day and knowing that it’s only going to get worse, I look to others who have been there and wait for them to say “there’s always hope.”
