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What a December that was, my first one with my mother and her Alzheimer’s! It was a December to remember!

I had no idea all that would come over the next 23 years.  The following year was my mother’s last Christmas on this earth.  I lived a crazy whirlwind life over the next few years, and I don’t even want to begin to go into all that now.  When I finally got out of an eight-year bad marriage, I learned my sister was about to be a grandmother for the first time, and it ended up being the only time, when her youngest gave birth to twin girls.  Those two sweet girls will turn thirteen in April.  They lost their grandmother. my sister, almost four weeks ago.

My sister was 81, would have turned 82 in February.  She and her husband had been married 63 years.  She had received her Parkinson’s diagnosis probably sometime pretty close to when her granddaughters were born.  She had done pretty well with it until she broke her hip.  She was never able to walk again except with a walker.  A few years ago after a minor car accident her leg was injured, she had surgery, and she was wheelchair bound from then on.  A few months ago off and on dementia began, with the more confusing times being late afternoon and evening, sundowning, just as it had been with our mother’s Alzheimer’s.  About three weeks before her death, she had become bedridden.

I haven’t been able to write of my sister’s death until now.  I did visit the day before she died, and though she had apparently had a stroke the night before and never fully woke up, I am so very grateful that I went to see her.

Twenty-three years later, years of joys and pain later, what a different Christmas this will be.

Twenty-three years in the future, I hope there will have been a cure found for Alzheimer’s and other dementias, and for Parkinson’s too, even if it’s too late for my sister … and me.

Twenty three years ago…My Journal…

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