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My grandmother suffered from the effects of Alzheimer's years before we realized anything was wrong. She had been getting forgetful and exhibited some odd behavior, but grandma had always been a little different anyway. If something was left on the kitchen table it would not be in the same place when we returned, and she couldn't remember what she had done with it. She started forgetting to feed her dog and about the coffee reheating on the stove. She would fall asleep in the middle of the day with a cigarette burning between her fingers and couldn't hear us banging on the door to come in. Several times she nearly started fires or had my mother scared that she was gone. We found out later that she slept so soundly because she wasn't sleeping at night. She would tell us stories about midnight trips to the grocery store down the street and car rides she could not have possibly taken because she had sold her car a couple of years previous. She lived by herself into her early 80s and it was only after the stress of a medical procedure and moving that we started putting the puzzle pieces together.

At my sister's school Christmas play my grandmother fell and broke her hip. She didn't come out of anesthesia the same woman. Her odd behavior from the previous couple of years was exaggerated and unceasing. My mom and her sister realized that grandma wasn't able to take care of herself and the whole house anymore so we moved her into an apartment building where other retirees lived. A woman she already knew and liked lived there and both my mom and my aunt lived within a few blocks. It ended up being a full time job having grandma on her own. She would call them in the middle of the night, swearing that someone was trying to break in. She would barricade herself into rooms and was forgetting to wash herself and to eat. We didn't realize it then, but my grandmother had sundowners, a common symptom of Alzheimers, and she had lost almost all of her short term memory.

After only a couple of months of living in the apartment my mother decided that grandma would live with her and my sister. They thought that being somewhere familiar would help her and that she just needed some help on remembering to bathe and to have someone provide meals. My aunt lived only a couple blocks away and could be with her during the day and my mom could take care of her at night. But after grandma scrounged through desk drawers and hoarded razor blades under her pillow, after she screamed

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