My Mom

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/23/opinion/alzheimers-dementia-advance-directives.html

("My Father Didn't Want to Live if He Had Dementia. But then He Had It")

I watched my mom live through a decade of indignities, small at first and then all encompassing in later years. When she died at age 99 it was, and I struggle to write this, a relief for all of us. But maybe mostly for my mom, even though she had no clue at the time that it was.

I know without question that my mom, if she could have expressed herself, wouldn't have wanted to live as she did in those final years. She was alive, but life for her, for all of us, is measured in quality, not quantity. And while the latter remained until her final breath, the former vanished long before.

It was so painful for my sister and me to watch and I know our mom would have died a thousand deaths before she would let her suffering cause ours.

I revered both my parents. I think of them every day and still speak of them often, even as my dad has been gone almost 44 years and my mom 6. That they are not here still causes me pain. But what my mom went through in those last years brought no joy to her or us. And while the author suggests that even in an altered state of being there is the possibility of something positive, I believe that constitutes far more wish than reality.

It is a hard, uncomfortable truth, but sometimes the right decision is just to let go.

Love is sometimes doing what hurts the most.