I used to visit my mom at least twice a week. She had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and used to live in an assisted living community dedicated to memory-impaired residents before she passed away. When I would see her, she often commented that everything was mixed up, that she couldn’t remember anything and that she was very frustrated. I would sit opposite her and acknowledge her frustration but couldn’t really say that I understood what she was going through because I didn’t.
When I was with her, I would try to put myself in her place. What if I tried to remember my spouse’s death but couldn’t remember when it was, if I was at the funeral or what the cause of death was? What if I searched my memory and couldn’t remember if I had one or two children and didn’t know where they were born? Imagining this situation would make me very anxious. I would ask myself the question, “If I no longer have a past, do I have an identity? Would I become a non-entity?”
Certainly my mother didn’t disappear during this time. She was a warm, loving presence in her community. Everyone who knew who she was commented on her friendly disposition and her sense of humor. It is interesting to note that once she began to lose her memory, she became a warmer, more caring person. She was very thankful for any show of kindness by anyone in her community and was so happy when I would come to see her.
Perhaps there is a valuable lesson here. Doesn’t our memory often define who we are? When we are faced with a decision, don’t we usually look back in our past and see how we handled it before? Or, when we are in a challenging situation, don’t we often determine what we will do based on our success or failure in similar situations in the past?
Isn’t this approach to life very much like driving on the road looking in the rear view mirror? How much of our experience is actually new and fresh? Or is it mostly a rehash of what we’ve done before? With this perspective, I have begun to look at memory in a new way. If I had no memory, wouldn’t each experience be interesting and unique? Wouldn’t it be very much like a young child facing life for the first time?
Perhaps we should begin to look at Alzheimer’s patients as those who live life totally in the present. When is it that they begin to accept their inability to recall events and live life totally now? And when they are able to do that, doesn’t life become a never-ending new experience with no barriers or limitations?
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Reprinted from Bob Mauterstock’s The Gift of Communication Blog. Subscribe at http://www.GiftofCommunication.com and receive Bob’s Family Meeting Checklist Guide.
