I love the opportunities I get to help out with multiple charities as a character that kids wow over, but I gotta admit that I brought my C game to this one. It had nothing to do with the event itself, I was just trying to negotiate the emotional mine field of the reason I was there, and the fact that my father suffers from Alzheimer's. I won't go into detail because I've discussed that in a previous entry, but it was hard for me to get excited about a photo booth fundraiser today. I even walked a lap in honor of my father, but the question kept coming back to me, "Does walking really do any good"? It's a rhetorical question, I know. Don't judge me. I'm a bit frazzled.
I know there are new theories and tests being developed all the time, and I don't mean to minimize the efforts of science, but I'm hard pressed to see any light at the end of this tunnel. Name one other disease that forces you to lose loved ones twice. First it takes their mind, but after that you're not sure if you want them to live or die. I know it sounds morbid but I honestly can't think of a better way to describe it. If any of you have experienced watching a loved one submit to this, please tell me this is a normal thought process or I'm going to feel even worse.
Did I mention I'm frazzled? I'm going through this (along with other *stuff*), friends are going through stuff, and I want all the stuff to leave us all alone for a while.-LG
Alzheimers is so difficult. Three of my grandparents have had it, and my husbands grandma had it. My mom-in-law used to drop off Grandma Pauline (my husband's grandma) at my house a few days a week so she (mom-in-law) could have some time for herself. It was difficult for me to watch her withdraw into a shell of herself...and I didn't even know her for very long before the disease came on. I can't imagine what it would be like to watch a parent go through it.
ReplyDeleteI know there is a purpose for everything in mortality, and in many things I can see the purpose. I suppose with Alzheimers I can see the purpose in the lives of those around the victim, but I struggle to understand what the purpose is for the victim. Isn't the veil we come to earth with enough forgetting? What's it like to forget so much? Can you still feel your family's love? God's love? There are a lot of questions I have for Heavenly Father about Alzheimers that I hope to ask him one day.
And about other "stuff", too. You mentioned wanting to take a machete to Alzheimers....I'd like to take a machete to Depression. But that's another story.