It is heart breaking to even think that the people you love the most don’t even remember you. To understand that all the happy times you shared with them have been washed away from their brain. To come to a realisation, that all the hard times you stuck to each other no longer remain for them. To accept the fact that they are not able to recall your very existence. Such is the painful agony of living with an Alzheimer’s patient.
A lady named Brittany Halbsgut recently shared a similar heart-rending post on Love What Matters. The post narrated the overwhelm of feelings she experienced when her Alzheimer’s suffering grandmom or mum-mum (as she calls her) recognized her for a micro second.
This post will not only leave you teary eyed but will also make you understand the value of your loved ones:
“As my mum-mum reached 90 today, I can’t help but reflect on this photo from two years ago. It’s special to me because when I look at it, I just know in my heart that it was a rare moment when my mum-mum came back to me.
You see, she has Alzheimer’s. When I visited her on this day, she spent much of the earlier part of it looking at me as though I was a stranger. She didn’t know who I was, why IÂ was there, or why I was talking to her. My momma and I would tell a story of a time we had with her and she would just kind of grunt and vaguely nod with a far off look in her eye. It broke my heart to see the independent, energetic, and lively woman I grew up with replaced with someone so sad and lost in her wheelchair. It wasn’t until we went outside to see the horses that she perked up.
As we sat outside, suddenly she began to tell me stories about when she was growing up (some true, some not), how she packed her husbands lunch that morning and he was currently at work (not true), and how she saw the retirement community with her mother and loved it so much she decided to come back (also not true). She told me these stories back to back to back without blinking an eye but at least she was talking. I acted surprised and interested every single time she repeated them.
Eventually, we turned and looked at each other. She stared into my eyes and I could see her mind turning. She asked me ‘What color are my eyes?’ When I told her green, she said ‘like yours?’ I said ‘no, mine are blue. Want to trade?’ When I moved in close, instead of pulling away in confusion, she laughed just like she used to, a big bellow from her stomach, and pulled me closer. This exact motion is something I remember seeing her and my momma do growing up and it’s something my momma and I still do. Plain and simple, it makes our eyes go all big and round and we usually end up giggling uncontrollably at how purely silly it looks. And that’s exactly what happened here. Through the fog, my mum-mum and I giggled and pressed our faces together just like old times. We laughed and laughed and asked when the eyeball trade was going to take place. Afterwards, she went back to telling made up stories and I realized once again how she lives in a world that I’m not a part of.
But for a few sweet minutes, captured here, Alzheimer’s took a break and gave me back my mum-mum.”
While it is completely heart wrenching to be reading someone’s story as sad as this, the happy twist in the end wins all our hopes back. The fact that even for a minuscule of a second, Brittany got to meet her old mum-mum back is what touched our hearts the most!