For Morgan

A fair few years ago, my mum started to show signs of Alzheimers' - she'd always been absent-minded but it had progressed(?) beyond that. She would forget that she had begun cooking a meal, until she happened to pass by the kitchen and notice the pots on the stove, things like that. She gave up driving because it required too much concentration, ditto reading. Dad gave up work to look after her as she slid from Alzheimers to dementia. Mum had a couple of little tricks she had taught herself in an effort to post-pone the inevitable. For instance she had memorised the name of every person who had ever been important in her life, a list she would recite every time she forgot someone's name, until she got the one that made the connection. One day dad came back from getting the paper and mum didn't recognise him. Thinking that he was an intruder she began to scream and throw things at him.
Dad went next door to get the neighbours to see if they could calm mum down, but she didn't recognise them, either. Eventually an ambulance came and mum never came home again. First stop was the psychiatric ward of the local hospital, then a home for about a year, then the crematorium. I wouldn't say it was entirely without humour, though; my mother, who had never deliberately insulted anybody in her (rational) life saw a rather large nurse bending over a table to help one of the other patients and said - loudly - "My God, look at the size of her arse!"
 
For some people, the slide happens all at once: in about 1998 I was back in Vic., visiting the olds. I pulled up at the traffic lights on the highway in their home town. There were a few cars in the right lane, I was the second car in the left lane. The lights changed to green, the car in front, didn't move. The lights changed to red again and I put my hazards on and went up to the front car to see what was wrong. Or remonstrate forcefully, as the case may be. The driver was a vaguely familiar old man, alone in the car and crying like a baby.
I knocked on the window, he looked at me. I knocked on the window again, he just kept looking at me, crying. I opened the door and said words to the effect of,"What's wrong, why don't you pull over if you're too upset to drive?"
"I can't" he said.
"What, won't it drive?"
"No," he said"I can't" I led him out of the car and 'round to the passenger seat. When the lights changed to green (yet again, many horns were blowing) I drove around the corner and parked, then got my car, which had sat there, unlocked and with the motor running all this time. Eventually, to cut a long story short, I found out that he was a farmer from my old home town and took him back to my parents' house. We contacted one of his kids who came and took him home. He died about three months later.
 
Somebody pretty special I know is going through something similar with her mother at the moment, only in her case it's largely self-inflicted. This, I would think, multiplies the pain and anger, but it shouldn't. I don't have a good reason why it shouldn't, except that it is not going to do you any good at all, emotionally or physically. You've come a long way, too far to go back. If you do allow yourself to be overcome by the situation, you will be no better than your mother. It will do nothing more than perpetuate the problem and spread it to those who come after.
 
Funny and/or ag-related stuff next-time I promise*.
*Promises on this site are not to be given any credence.