Life with my mother who has Alzheimer’s

By Venkat Subramanian

During the Covid pandemic days, I noticed the first signs that something was wrong with my mother. There were small indications – like forgetting where the car keys had been kept, forgetting to lock the main door, forgetting to take medicine, forgetting the names of family and friends.

I am a single child and my parents were living in Bengaluru. Since I used to work at Hyderabad, I used to regularly visit them. Then Covid struck and there was work from home.

During that period, there were noticeable changes in my mother’s behaviour. I spoke to my father who agreed that something was amiss. He thought that she was forgetting things due to old age. Finally, we decided to take her to a doctor who informed us that my mother was suffering from Alzheimer’s.

Last year, I was going through a messy divorce so my father asked me to move in with them. Not only did their presence helped me in a difficult time, I too was able to give support to them. It was then that I saw that my mother’s condition had rapidly deteriorated. Over the phone, she would be lost even when a conversation was taking place.

It was emotionally draining to see my mother being forgetful.

One day, the main door was ajar and my mother was nowhere to be seen. I and my father quickly went out to look for her. Fortunately, she had reached the main security gate of our colony where the guards were talking to her. She was not able to respond to their gentle questions.

We then decided to inform our society office bearers who alerted the security guards to ensure that whenever my mother was seen without either my father or me, they were to immediately alert us.

The feeling of having a parent suffering from Alzheimer’s is emptiness and a deep sense of sadness. Everything is a struggle. Activities that looked simple in the past like going for a walk, now became a task. Cooking was out of question since she did not remember the ingredients and what was more worrying was that she would forget to shut the burner. It once happened that my mother forgot to switch off the burner and the food kept in a vessel turned to cinders.

Every day is like a roller coaster ride. There are days when the situation is bad and then there are days when the situation is worse. She would forget to take her medicines and would become argumentative when we insisted that she take her medicines.

Now we have begun to expect for things to go wrong at any point of the day. Once, she was returning from her walk and forgot which flat she had to go to. Fortunately, my father was with her and guided her into the flat.

My father worries what will happen after he is no more. The family is now running on his pension. If he is gone, I will have to be the bread earner as well as the primary caregiver. I really don’t know what I will do.

I am now part of an emotional journey that requires considerable patience and resilience. We have been able to manage well, but I hope that things don’t deteriorate further when it will become virtually impossible to look after a mother with Alzheimer’s and a father who too is growing old with his own share of health issues.

Related report
https://theirstory.in/when-the-wish-to-live-is-gone/