Last year it was a distinct privilege for my wife and I to grow close to an elderly lady in her last few months.
We were not officially “family,” so we weren’t told any of the medical details. But two things were obvious to anyone (including those members of my Adult Sunday school class who came to visit her and to love her): “Kay” (not her real name) had a mild-to-moderate case of dementia but nowhere near as severe as the staff thought.
In the last months of Kay’s life, I visited her almost every day. It wasn’t until after she died that I realized how much she reminded me of my mother, who passed away in 1992. Kay was a hoot.
I thought of Kay when I read a piece this morning that had actually appeared in the February 16 New York Times. “Finding Joy in Alzheimer’s” was written by Robert Leleux, and I gather the essay was a sort of primer on his book, “The Living End: A Memoir of Forgetting and Forgiving.”
Naturally, Leleux’s experience with JoAnn (his grandmother who had Alzheimer’s) was a hundred times lengthier, more intense, and richer than anything Lisa and I could have developed in our short time with Kay. But in his deeply affectionate essay, I could hear echoes of our experience with a woman who often confused me with a long-ago neighbor, but liked me all the more for bringing back memories of the old neighborhood.
I will not cheat you out of the pleasure of reading “Finding Joy in Alzheimer’s” by going into any great detail. Let me just offer one quotation. Leleux writes,
“I’d argue that, given our aging population and the Alzheimer’s epidemic, it’s essential that we reassess our thinking about the elderly and old age dementia. Certainly, a great deal of pain and hardship can accompany life’s third act (and, for that matter, any of its acts). But what I learned from my grandmother’s journey through Alzheimer’s was that my grief regarding her condition had largely to do with my failure to accept the change she was undergoing.
“Regardless of how I felt about it, JoAnn’s change was the truth. What was gone in her was not missing. And the more fully I understood that, the more present I was able to be during her final years. In that struggle to be present, to appreciate every minute spent ‘walking her to the garden gate,’ as we say back in Texas, JoAnn was once again my example. Like on that long-ago afternoon at the Houston art museum, she was still guiding my hand.”
In just a matter of a few months, Kay taught me many things, first and foremost was the deep misunderstanding of anyone who might say, “What’s the point? She won’t even remember that you had been there.”
Kay knew me when I was there, and appreciated every visit. I knew I had been there and was all the richer because I had the privilege of remembering for both of us.
