Losing my mother in 2008 was the worst experience of my life

Why?

Because she had senile dementia the last 7 years of her life. I had taken her to europe to see where her parents Grew up near Glascow, Scotland. Her mother had been born in Philadelphia to two scottish parents in 1888 but their home burned down and they all had to return to Clydebank, Scotland where they were all from near Glasgow, Scotland. My grandfather had been born in Boston but his father died trying to get medicine for him when he was 8 by getting pneumonia and died and his mother and brother and sister all returned to Scotland also because their breadwinner had died. So, my grandmother and grandfather (my mother's parents likely came back to the U.S. after they married and moved first to Omaha, Nebraska where many family members were working for the newspaper there. Later they moved to Seattle, Washington where my mother mostly grew up and where she met my father.

So, in 1999 I had taken my mother to Glascow, Scotland and Edinburgh where her husband had lived as a young man before he met and married her there in Scotland. She was okay there in Scotland and later in England but her senile dementia showed up first in Germany in europe. We had landed in Munich and my mother had been acting very strange. I had rented a 6 passenger motor home in Munich, Germany which is pronounced not munich like we say but rather Munchen when you are actually there. But, when she got into the motor home she refused to get out all the time I rented this motorhome which we all thought was really strange because it was. It also made much more work for me emptying the septic system and buying and bringing her food all the time too. I had no idea what was happening because I had no experience with the early onset of senile dementia which is associated with something called "TRansfer Trauma" or the inability to be in new situations around new people that happens often as people age past a certain point. My mother was around 80 then and passed on a few months before she turned 90.

I had thought that nothing I could experience could be worse than losing my father when I was 37. Nope. This was infinitely worse because when my mother almost burned down her home I had to put her in a rest home to keep her and others safe from whatever she did then.

And this went against what I had promised my Dad that my mother would never be put in a rest home. But, the liability of my mother burning my own home down when I wasn't watching her was just too great so I had no choice in putting her in a rest home. This was infinitely worse than anything I ever could have imagined for the next 7 years while she slowly regressed down from her age to age 4 in her mind while moving herself around in a wheelchair to not knowing who I or who my son was who had cared for her until she had to be put in a rest home.

This was the worst experience of my life going through this and I'm really glad this didn't happen when I was single or else I likely would have taken my mother and I out dead in response to it.

But, Life is for the living and I had a wife and children to think about. It didn't matter what I might have preferred. I had responsibilities to attend to as an adult male. 

So, having responsibilities to many people will keep you alive even when you prefer to be gone.

And I think this is a good thing.

By God's Grace