Tag Archives: dementia

The Last of Jane Roberts

Jane Roberts' college graduation picture
Jane Roberts' college graduation picture
After years of dementia, with barely anything left of who she was except a glint in her eyes of recognition when she saw me, and the ability to somehow still swing a tennis racket, my mom ended this incarnation, to relief and sadness on my part. Reflecting on the entirety of her 83 years of life, particularly the first half of it, I am struck by how she managed to use her imagination to make up for a lack of resources and “be effective” challenging conventional wisdom, including aspects of the liberal progressivism of the university town where she spent the best years of her adulthood.

My partner Sally and I were in a hotel in Denver where Sally was attending a conference and I was just enjoying a long weekend away from Los Angeles. I was woken up by a call after midnight from the emergency room at Presbyterian Memorial Hospital in Van Nuys. The nurse on the phone said that my mom had been admitted, in a coma, after collapsing at her assisted-living residence, and that the doctor needed instructions on whether to try and take the measures to keep her alive. Continue reading →

My Mom’s Last Good Fight

Jane Roberts around 1999
Jane Roberts around 1999
My mom had always been an activist and forever relished a “good fight” for the things she believed in, but found herself, at age 76 after moving out to Los Angeles to live with us, diagnosed with dementia and a final seven-year struggle with the gradual loss of memories and the general unraveling of her once great mind. My mom was a fighter to the end, but with the continuing loss of her faculties, that fight got more and more quixotic and convoluted, and difficult for those of us around her. For me experiencing this with her, every day I grieved the loss of one more piece of the bigger-than-life person she had been.

As I indicated in another vignette (The “D” Word), a few years after my dad’s death in 1984, my mom was diagnosed with an atrial fibrillation that was causing her heart to not pump blood properly. For years it was treatable, but finally not, and the oxygen flow to her brain became permanently compromised, leading to the dementia. To my mom and the intellectual powerhouse she had once been, her diagnosis carried with it such profound fear that she could only deal with it by denial. When I tried to discuss the issue further on the way home from the doctor’s, my mom glared at me and told me candidly that she could not deal with the thought of “losing her mind” and so she did not want to talk about it again. Continue reading →

The “D” Word

Jane Roberts around 1999
Jane Roberts around 1999

In 1999, recently arrived in Los Angeles from her little town of Wolfeboro New Hampshire, my mom was diagnosed during the first visit with her new doctor with dementia. Where a diagnosis of cancer used to be feared by many as an automatic death sentence, today many people, including my partner Sally are “cancer survivors”. But today for many, the most fearful diagnosis is one of “Alzheimer’s” or “dementia”. To date I have not encountered anyone introducing themselves as an “Alzheimer’s” or “dementia survivor”. How can a person (or their loved ones) come to grips with “losing their mind”? What is more precious and irreplaceable to us than our memories and our personality?

A few years after my dad’s death in 1984, my mom was diagnosed with an atrial fibrillation, which was causing her heart to not pump blood properly. What had provoked this condition was never confirmed, but her doctor suspected that it had been some sort of virus that had attacked and damaged the muscles of, and maybe physically reflecting perhaps the metaphoric “breaking” of, her heart, after a lifetime struggle with self esteem, lacking the love of her own mother, and never finding the kind of loving relationship with a man that she continued to long for. Continue reading →