Surviving

I watched Marley and Me on DVD with my family tonight. At the end of Marley's life it took me to losing one of our dogs a few years ago before we replaced her with a female Corgi puppy. My 13 year old was crying because she said she wanted to be there when we had our Maggie Mae (Jack russel and corgi mix) put to sleep.) Our dog sitter forgot to bring in our two dogs after dark when we were gone and Maggie Mae got into it with a raccoon and had to be put to sleep because of kidney failure within the next month.

I told my daughter when Maggie Mae's friend(my dog) passes away I told her she can be there if we have to put him to sleep sometime in the future. (He's about 9 or 10 years old now).

However, the issue that came up for me was not dogs. It was losing my mother. The hell of my experience with her the last ten years of her life basically tore me a new one.

My wife's father also passed in this last year but that was more bearable simply because he had all his faculties until the end. However, my mother started slipping away mentally starting in 1999 when I took her to Scotland, England and Europe. She was 80 then. At the time I didn't know what "transfer trauma" was. It is caused by moving someone whose mental faculties are slipping even though you aren't aware of what is happening to a new or different location than they have been before.

My mother in 1999 was okay once I took her to Scotland where her parents grew up near Glascow. However, when I flew with her and my daughter to Germany to rent a motor home and meet my then 25 year old son and his friend in Munich she didn't leave the motor home even once as we drove and camped through Germany, Austria, Switzerland and northern Italy. Then when we flew from Munich back to London she stayed in her basement hotel room even when we could have gotten a better one and wouldn't leave it and only watched TV for about 4 days.

When we returned through San Francisco Airport to our home on the California Coast I was pretty angry at my mother for being so incredibly difficult because I didn't realize that the cause was early senile dementia.

I could go on at how it got worse and worse until she had to be institutionalized in a senile dementia alzheimer's facility after she almost burned down her apartment but I won't.

The important thing since she has passed on now is that I find a way to cope with the last 10 years. It stripped from my all the wonderful memories of my mother completely away from me and left me feeling completely emotionally raped by life in regard to all my positive memories of my mother.

Some of you might say to me that I should think of what this did to her. However, she was no longer mentally or emotionally the person who raised me. She was the same body that raised me but not the same person. She was about 50 or more different personalities that slowly regressed from about age 18 down to age 1 and then she died from senile dementia at age 89. The doctor said her heart and body were so strong she would have lived to 100 otherwise. What killed my mother was hardening of the arteries of the brain(senile dementia)

This was the first person close to me that I have lost from this ailment. My father died in 1985 from Bone cancer after having Prostate, bladder and kidney cancer first. He lived 1 year after having his prostate, bladder and one kidney removed. However, I have had 24 years to get used to him dying.

They say when someone has senile dementia or Alzheimers you have no closure until your loved one dies. But from my experience one has the experience of dying 100s of times while watching ones loved one become a stranger.

In other countries often the relative that takes care of this person goes crazy or dies with the relative or commits suicide with the relative. I did not have this option as I had to think about my wife and young daughter and my grown children and I had to let go of my mother into an senile dementia and alzheimer's facility as she became a danger to herself and others after setting her stove on fire for 24 hours and instead of putting it out sitting at her kitchen table and praying for the flames not to burn her up. Luckily the large plastic bowl she put on her stove dripped liquid flaming plastic down the side of the stove only and didn't set the floor or anything else on fire. My son came home and realized she had to be institutionalized after this incident. (She had been warned by my son and I never to use the stove only the microwave because she wasn't together enough to use a stove safely).

Looking back I have to look at it all as medical triage. We saved the part of our family that could be saved and had to let my mother go. I often wish there had been another way for her. I often idealize about the eskimo idea of old people simply getting on an iceberg and drifting out to sea. However, in reality this is mostly only romantic kinds of stuff, unless one just buys a cabin in the woods and takes enough risks to walk into a snow storm one day and not come back. Though I often think of this as an outcome for me one day I know I will do whatever it takes to make sure my children are well taken care of as long as I can. At that point whatever I do is my own business.