Current mood:

sad

The long goodbye
I have a grandfather who’s in his 80’s. He lives a couple of hours from my home city of Fredericton in the small rural town of Beachwood. Both him and my grandmother grew up in that town, raised their four kids in that town, and in early May will be leaving it forever. Back in 1997 my grandfather was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. He went on a trial drug for a time with some good results but now his mind is in a state of constant decline. My grandparents will be moving into a smaller home in Fredericton where they’ll be closer to my mom but it’s felt that before long my grandfather will need to be put into a nursing home. My grandfather doesn’t really know those around him anymore, he’s often in his own world and sometimes reverts into memories of his youth. He often gets up in the middle of the night and roams around in a confused state. There’ve been times when my grandmother has helped him to the bathroom that he wouldn’t want her to come in with him. He can’t recognize her as his wife, just some strange woman he doesn’t know. I’m sure the move will be confusing for him, the only world he knows pulled out from under him and shipped off to another city. If he is put in a home he’ll no doubt feel abandoned at first; he won’t really know why he’s there.

Through all this my thoughts turn to my grandmother. In the later years of her own life she nurses a husband who is no longer the man she married. Deep down inside my mom said goodbye to him a long time ago. Even though he’s alive her father is gone. I remember when my grandfather was sharp and inquisitive, he loved watching the news and for fun started to write his own trivia game. He loved to tell stories and being a farmer for most of his life had quite a few to tell. But the disease robbed him of that, he got to a point where he was afraid to speak for fear of getting things wrong. He knew what was happening to him and knew there wasn’t much he could do about it. In the end Alzheimer’s has robbed my grandfather of his identity and I can only see the cruelty of it all.