by Leah Curtis

Created on: March 17, 2009

I have heard Alzheimer's referred to as "the long goodbye". If you have ever lived with a person afflicted with the disease you know just how accurate that statement is. My mother-in-law is now in the latter stages of Alzheimer's. She lived with us for six years before going into a nursing home late last year. My husband brought her to live with us without any consultation or warning. She was already suffering from Alzheimer's and we were not prepared for this sudden change in our lives. Our family became polarized; it was my husband and his mother against my daughter and me.

I wish I could write poignantly about living with a person who suffers from Alzheimer's. However, there was nothing poignant about the years that followed. My emotions about the situation ran the gamut from good to bad, from sadness and weariness to outright resentment. My daughter needed me back. She was a young girl who was trying her best to cope with a situation that she had no control over. My daughter was not quite ten at the time and my mother-in-law resented any time my husband spent with her. If my husband even spoke to our daughter, his mother considered it a betrayal and life at our home was, to say the least, miserable. It was so difficult for my daughter understand the person her beloved grandmother had become.

I was my mother-in-law's caretaker. Her son, my husband, spent years in denial regarding his mother's condition. He would work all day and go away every weekend. He spent his holidays with his friends. He said he was under too much stress at work to have to deal with anything at home. My husband is a good man but he felt over-burdened by work and everything going on at home. That does not excuse his behaviour but it explains it. My daughter resented her father for not taking an active role in the care of his mother and my daughter told me that she hated both her grandmother and her father. She missed the time that we had always spent together. I missed the time we had always spent together.

I enrolled my mother-in-law in a day program for persons with Alzheimer's. She spent four hours a day away from home and it was an enormous relief to have a few hours to myself each day. I will admit, though, that each day as I heard her bus pull up to the house my stomach would fill with knots and I would have a flash of utter resentment. I felt resentment toward my husband, my mother-in-law and, at times, the world in general.

I do not hang onto resentment very well and I learned to

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