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This video was done quite a few years ago. I was remembering then. I still am now. Having a mother with Alzheimer’s can leave you that way. I’ve changed a lot through the years, but this one thing has remained. I have to remember her, I have to tell our story, I have to walk each year in memory of her.
I had been with my mother about ten months. Her 79th birthday was that month. It was a strange month, seemed to get more difficult each day, and I was already thinking of giving up. My mother’s confusion had gotten so bad, and she was angry with me almost every day, sometimes again and again all day it seemed.
My journal told our almost daily story. It is up now for all to read, on my Web site and in my book.
My sister passed away a few years ago after suffering from Parkinson’s disease for about ten years. All my siblings passed away over the past few years.
I will be 69 this year, am still working as a community college librarian, and this October I will walk in memory of my mother for my 27th year with the Alzheimer’s Association in the Walk to End Alzheimer’s.
The following April, 28 years ago, my mother turned 80 and passed away after four months in a nursing home.
I’ve been reading that in articles for the past week. I know that mine has been coming back for six months or now. I have been working on it for an hour or so most every day. It has been quite a task because at some point over the years my border backgrounds were no longer the right width. I learned that I needed to use CSS (Cascading style sheets) to get them to look as they had before. Though I have gone over most of them, I still have a few of my 365 pages to correct (thankfully probably half of them have tiled or no instead of border backgrounds). I have had to delete or comment out the links to some of my pages where so many links have disappeared or do some explaining in the text while I search for replacements.
It was a whole different world on the internet back in 1996. We had so many personal “homepages”. There was Geocities and other sites that let anyone create homepages for free. There were so many people I met who had created pages to honor their loved ones who had Alzheimer’s, and so much support in chats and mailing lists. There were so many creative people doing pages to showcase and offer to others their backgrounds, graphics, animations, and music. And there were awards for personal homepages. There were a few big ones, but mostly it was just awards created by one person to give to another, to show appreciation, and to help bring traffic. My site made it to the top ten most awarded personal homepages.
Then life took me away from the Web. Work, a divorce, relationships, marrying my 1st again, then his divorcing me again, then all my siblings passing away over a few years, and five cats passing away as well. My aim has been to go back and update my site as soon as I retired. But retirement kept getting postponed, and the fact that both my brothers passed away at 74 made me stop in my tracks and realize that I might not make it to retirement and even if I did, probably wouldn’t be much beyond.
So I have begun, and I will continue, and I will keep being amazed and saddened by how much the Web has changed, though I know technology has advanced. And my site, though I try to do it professionally as I can, will still always be a personal site, with my caregiving journal, my poetry, and my photos of my mother and my family through the years.
I’d like to invite you to visit A Year to Remember…with my mother and Alzheimer’s disease at http://www.zarcrom.com/users/yeartorem/
Remembering My Mother & Alzheimer's .. 