Living with Alzheimer's
At first my mother would ask the same questions over and over again. "When is Nancy coming over?" or “What does your husband do for a living?” repeated every five minutes like a loop. She would forget that she had three brothers or that all of them were dead. That I had to go to work and couldn’t go shopping that day. Then she began to let her tea kettle boil dry and her bath overflow. When my brother installed a shutoff device in the tub in case she went to check her mail and left the water running again she didn't thank him for saving her from a problem, she cursed him for the inconvenience. “I was barely gone a minute” she complained bitterly “and all the water drained out of my bath!” ‘Thank God', we said to ourselves, ‘at least she didn’t ruin her neighbor’s carpet again.’ The first two times that she forgot she was running herself a bath, the water had seeped right through the walls and the floorboards to the apartment next door. She was furious, insul...