I'm sensitive to the fact that watching and caring for someone with Alzheimer's can be exhausting and heartbreaking. Alzheimer's is a progressive and fatal disease and the most common kind of dementia. It affects people in many different ways and to different degrees. In the case of a friend's grandmother, Alzheimer's took an interesting twist.
The grandmother, Bernice, was dutiful and anxious. Nothing was more important than her family. Her own mother died of double pneumonia before treatment with antibiotics became common practice. Bernice was around eight or nine at the time. Her father remarried. Her step-mother did not like her; she felt abandoned. She lived through the hardships of the depression. She was very smart but like many women of her generation, she followed a traditional script. She was the proverbial good woman behind a successful man. She pushed her husband and son. Beneath it all she was angry. Some would say she was wound very tightly.
As the disease progressed, things changed for Bernice. I'd known her for 13 years and don't remember her ever cracking a joke. Now she would see her husband and say with an uncharacteristically big smile "that's my honey pie". As she lost her memory, the weight of her early losses faded; she forgot to be hypervigilant. The anger at always having to drive another person was gone. She didn't have to take care of everybody. She was free as a bird. In forgetting, she was finally happy.
In his article called "Modern Love", Robert Leleux describes the disease as seeming to liberate his grandmother. "Imagine: to be freed from your memory, to have every awful thing that ever happened to you wiped away -- and not just your past, but your worries about the future, too. Because with no sense of time or memory, past and future cease to exist, along with all sense of loss and regret. Not to mention grudges and hurt feelings, arguments and embarrassments."
I'm left wondering why it can take a fatal dementia for some of us to empty our life's pockets of the lead weights of past grudges, resentments, and hurt feelings.
