‘My mum’s diagnosis taught us to live in the moment’

HOW LIFE GOT DIVIDED INTO COMPARTMENTS AFTER A PARENT GETS ALZHEIMER’S — AND THE LESSONS WE LEARNT

“Will she be soon unable to express physical pain?” I asked the doctor. “Not immediately, but eventually, she may,” he replied.

Why can’t all doctors be psychiatrists who understand the nuances of conveying bad news sensitively, I wondered. As soon as I was done with him, I reached out for my cell phone to call my husband to mouth expletives. He was silent. Underneath the rage, a fear was simmering — that of seeing a parent suffer in silence.

My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2018. Our memories, as a family, are neatly compartmentalised into the time before and after her diagnosis. In the time before, she had been a woman who had hopes from her retired life. She’d been wanting to visit England. Having a sweet tooth, she learnt baking. She wanted to run after grandchildren who were yet to be born. But somewhere in the middle of her daydreaming, a nightmare was unfolding.

Mum would often forget where she had kept things — cutlery, wallet, jewellery. She was convinced that our domestic helps had either stolen them or taken them away. We put the forgetfulness and what appeared to be cynicism at her age — and her general nervous demeanour. There had been no history of Alzheimer’s in her side of the family, and hence no reason to be alarmed.

She’d also begun to seek people. A guest in the house would be talked to for hours together. The cook would be told tales from yesteryears. How could this have been Alzheimer’s when she so clearly remembered insignificant details from the past?

And then came the day when she forgot the route to my grandmother’s home. Something was amiss.

The first doctor was unusually silent and prescribed some pills. The second one said it’s treatable if she is not nutritionally deficient. The third one said there will be no cure.

My mother, in the meanwhile, was becoming a fraction of the woman she once was. Less sure of her place in the world, less convinced about her dependability, and almost never happy. Conventional wisdom will have you believe that people lose appetite for life in old age, you have to create moments that can make memory. To mum, everything became a fleeting moment.

Our family, too, became a casualty of Alzheimer’s. Last year, as the lockdown in India meant people stayed at home, the disorientation my mother was experiencing eventually culminated into her forgetting my father, her partner of 46 years and speaking to my brother as though he was only 17. By this time, I had already become a stranger.

The individual nature of the grief means every member deals with it in their own way. My father’s escape was television, brother’s was silence, and mine was writing.

As my mother loses a memory she once held dear every day, week or month, we, too, are in this constant state of loss. She smiles when she looks at her own people, but I suspect that her normalcy sometimes is a cloak for the confusion and disorientation she is experiencing inside.

Fear and grief aside, Alzheimer’s taught us an important life lesson — the necessity to live in the moment. Knowing that my father as well as my mother’s side of the family has Alzheimer’s, I am quite prepared to have the sum total of my life’s experiences boiling down to a void.

But before that, it’d help to live a little. Just like mum did.

The disorientation my mother was experiencing eventually culminated into her forgetting my father, her partner of 46 years and speaking to my brother as though he was only 17