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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/
I’m not sure what made me stop writing here six years ago, but I suspect it had to do with the fact that my siblings had started passing away. My oldest brother passed away in 2016 at the age of 74. My sister passed away the next year in 2017 at the age of 81. My other brother passed away last year in 2022 at the age of 74.
My brother-in-law passed away a week before Christmas 2021, so now there’s no one back home.
And the man I was married to twice, who was my forever friend even when we weren’t together, passed away a little over a year ago in 2022.
Plus I had knee replacement surgery in Feb. 2020 just before Covid-19 hit. I had the other one done this year in March 2023 just as Covid was letting up enough to have it done.
All this and the death of several of my cats over these years I guess made me forget to come here.
I am grateful for new friends who came along eight years ago who helped me through all this.
I am grateful that I was able to walk for my 26th consecutive year in memory of my mother in this year’s Walk to End Alzheimer’s.
I am still working at 68, and I suppose life is not going to slow down anytime soo, so I must just get back at it. I am finally getting back at updating my lost-in-cyberspace Web site I started back in 1996 in memory of my mother.
Oh so much has changed since back then!
http://www.zarcrom.com/users/yeartorem/MyJournal_3.html
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…
http://www.zarcrom.com/users/yeartorem/MyJournal_3.html
It was my 20th year walking in memory of my mother this Sept. 23, just two days before my 62nd birthday. For the second year in a row I was a Grand Champion, raising over $1000. I led Team Awesome, and together we raised $1697. My team came in 4th, and I also came in 4th from the top as an individual. I couldn’t keep away the tears during the Memory Garden ceremony. Twenty-one years later, my sister who is a late-stage Parkinson’s patient, also is getting dementia. I will walk for her next year too, whether or not she is alive, because the Walk to End Alzheimer’s is not only for Alzheimer’s but other dementias as well. I will walk as long as I can walk, and even if I cannot, my team members will probably push me in a wheelchair. I will keep on, hoping that one day there will be a white flower as a part of the Memory Garden ceremony. Now there are purple, yellow, orange and blue for the following:
Blue — I have Alzheimer’s
Yellow — I am supporting or caring for someone with Alzheimer’s
Purple — I have lost someone to Alzheimer’s
Orange — I support the cause and a vision of a world without Alzheimer’s
My mother
I’ll be walking in the Alzheimer’s Association Memory Walk again this year, for the 11th year. My mother had Alzheimer’s and she died in 1996. I was with her full-time for a year and four months before putting her in a nursing home. Then she died four months later. Not an easy thing to go through. Hard to believe it’s been over twelve years now.
Thank you so much for whatever you can do to help patients and caregivers everywhere and to help find a cure for this disease.
Remembering My Mother & Alzheimer's .. 
