There's so many little moments I look back on now and wonder if it was the
disease. Years ago my husband started commenting on how bad my mom was at making
coffee. I just added more creamer and drank it down, not giving the stale
tasting coffee a second thought. She had been making me coffee for years, maybe
her pot just needed to be de-calcified or maybe she was cutting back on the
amount of beans used? Eventually, it just became easier for me to always take her a Starbucks than have her brew us a pot.
There was a strawberry pie incident that left the first (and only)
bite of pie sizzling on our tongues. She had been making this pie my entire life, but
surely it was a simple ingredient mistake, nothing that I should to be alarmed
about.
As my grandparents aged and required moving from the town of Santa Claus
to the same town as my mother, she became the caregiver for their daily needs.
Besides working at the library, she was now taking my grandparents to every
doctors appointment, doing their grocery shopping, basic housekeeping at their
apartment, managing their medication, while also taking care of her own house,
husband, and being our mother. My sister and I watched the toll the role of
caregiver took on her. As their needs became more than she could handle, my
grandparents moved into a nearby nursing home. Even with their daily needs no
longer my mom's responsibility, the stress and guilt of them being in a nursing
home continued to plague her.
She began to voice that she was forgetting things and was visibly upset that certain things were happening. An example would
be going through the drive-thru to grab food. One day after paying for her meal,
she drove off and never stopped at the second window to grab her food. Mom
assumed her actions were the result of stress from having aging parents residing
in a nursing home. I readily agreed and told her she just needed to slow down,
take some deep breaths, and everything would be ok. Looking back, she voiced her
concern and chalked it up as stress. Did she really know that something more
serious was taking place? Is it possible that denial was already in play and we
both chose to ignore possible signs. It'd be six more years before denial was no
longer an option and reality would gut punch us when we least expected it.
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