Death Before the Last Breath
By Lynn Crain

“Do you think I'm going crazy?” my mother asked me one quiet afternoon in a parking lot before going into one of her favorite places, a local casino where she could mindlessly entertain herself for hours.

My heart cringed at those words. By this time, I had a very real grasp of the situation. “No, Mom, I don't think you're going crazy. I think you are very, very sick.”

How do you answer a loved one when faced with this dilemma? The dilemma being the recent diagnosis of what amounts to some people as an immediate death sentence: my mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

Living with the disease was a scary prospect. While I didn't live with my mother any more, my father still did, and I knew first and foremost, that it was very important to do what he wanted. My father, God love him, took care of her for four years on his own, watching helplessly while the woman he loved sank deeper and deeper into the grip of a horrible disease. A disease from which there was no possible return.

Alzheimer's has been in the news more since the death of former President Ronald Reagan than the whole time my mother was alive. In the eleven years between her diagnosis and her death, a lot had been done in the way of research. The early drugs were harsh on the stomach. She couldn't take them due to a stomach ulcer she developed in her twenties. This made it even harder to watch, because for her, there was nothing she could even take to make the progress of the disease slow down one little bit.

So how does one live with this horrible disease?

One day at a time.

Some days with my mother the changes were pronounced and others there didn't seem to be much difference. The scariest day for me was the day my mother told me that there was a woman following her. When I looked at my father, I realized that he was about to burst into tears. So I asked her, “what woman?” She stood and pointed at her reflection in the mirror, “That woman.”