by Samantha Pratt-Tyler

Created on: September 03, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

There is something so sad and yet inevitable when you love someone who has dementia or close to it alzhemiers that you slowly watch who they are die.

My son's biological father has had 4 strokes from which he has survived physically, but not mentally nor in the capacity to take physical care of himself. I for a while and then his sister did what we could but the effects got so bad he had to be put in a nursing home which he hates and who can blame him?

This is a man who worked most of his life; who played football in high school, loved to be at the beach and take pictures, loved life and his job at construction, until his knees gave out and then he started not a business, but 5 different ones which he ran by himself. He always amazed me as how he could do it and it still does. After his first two strokes he could do some of one job but not the rest. I saw his grief and agony as he could not do what he felt a man should do. Then he still had his memory and could walk and drive, the third stroke took his walking and driving ability and the fourth his memory.

It hurts to see this vital man wasting away in a nursing home, not knowing when people came to see him and forgetting those whom he was friends with who died, to see him grieve all over again for them when reminded they are gone breaks my heart.

Each time I see him a piece more of my heart breaks, for this is a man I loved and now even though he remembers me and most of our past, there is a lot of holes for him which we have to keep going over each time I see him.

I dread the day when he will not know me. I know that day will come, and I will never really be for it, even though I must. For it is the course of the disease, one where you slowly watch the person you love dissolve inside themself, unable to really remember the past, or even the present and not able to see a future.

It is hard to express the way I feel, just to say it breaks my heart says it all to me but to someone else it may not express mourning. But as I write tears flow, my chest is tight and I know a deep level of profound sadness which I have to confront each time I go to visit him. For it is about him not about me. So I have pushed aside what I feel to get through this hard time, but writing this the dam has broken and so many mixed feelings arise that they are hard to place and write.

My life has been changed by these events. I feel I have lost my best friend, but when I see I know he is in there wishing to escape as much as I wish he could. I hold him close it is all I can do. I try to make him laugh so I do not cry, he cries, I comfort. It is the least I can do for him, he's been through so much and survived, and yet at what cost? I am thankful he is alive, but yet I know he is not really living and that makes me sad, angry, frustrated and confused.

It is not easy watching the one you love disappear.

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