As I Remember

I had heard of Alzheimer’s but I had never really put any thought into what all the symptoms of the disease were. When I was little I would hear older people talk about someone who had lost their mind. The older people didn’t know what was going on either. All they knew was that someone had forgotten where they lived or maybe forgotten who their family members were. I even remember the older people saying that someone went to the “crazy house”. In the Baptist choirs we often sang songs thanking the Lord that we woke up “clothed in our right mind”. It wasn’t until Mama was stricken with Alzheimer’s that I realized what we had been singing about for all those years. Mental illness is a topic that wasn’t taken as serious as other diseases. The mental debilitations were not as obvious as someone who had cancer or diabetes. You could feel a lump with cancer. You can see the fainting or feel your sugar level when it goes up with diabetes. We couldn’t see Mama’s mental condition begin to deteriorate. We didn’t know that when items kept disappearing into a black hole, Alzheimer’s was giving us warning signals. Mama struggled with an enemy that she didn’t know of. She was good at fixing up home remedies to take care of just about anything but Alzheimer’s is one that she could not come up with a home remedy for. I believe that if Mama had known about Alzheimer’s and that it was the enemy that caused people not to stay in their right mind, she would have tried to come up with a remedy. Mama was helpless. When I look back on some of the symptoms that Mama was having, I wonder if I would have wanted to know. I know that this sounds selfish but I believe that there would have been a lot of sadness. I probably would have cried a lot just knowing how the symptoms would progress and that one day my Mama would not recognize me.