A certain answer to this question is that we can’t possibly know. Of course the feelings within the Alzheimer’s patient run the gamut across the wide terrain of denial, fear, anxiety, anger, frustration, confusion and depression to an emotionally barren state of nothingness. What a loved one is feeling depends on where he/she is in this journey, but our observations, clinical studies, and wrenching experiences give us indisputable clues about the paient's desperate and inevitable descent. Entering the world of the loved one and working at connecting with him/her is the foundation of caregiving.

We saw our mother lose the beauty and essential connectivity which memory provides. Like a Polaroid process in reverse, who she had been faded away. She was adrift, her past cut loose from the present, the future unimaginable.

We saw our mother lose the affirmation which our experience grants us when we exercise sound judgment. Her ability to integrate her experience, values, rational thought, culture and immediate circumstance was dissected. The effort of the Alzheimer’s patient is fragmented; therefore, the outcome is flawed, and often is nonsensical.

We saw our mother lose the “ah ha” moment of understanding. Her comprehension of what she heard, saw, read – even smelled – seemed to be suspended in an incoherent, meaningless effort.

We saw our mother lose control over bodily functions over which she had reigned a lifetime. “Mind over matter” was a thing of the past.

We can only imagine how a person with probable Alzheimer’s disease feels:

· I am supposed to teach the Sunday school lesson, but I don’t remember the point. This scares me.

· The family gathering is coming up, but I can’t always remember names, even of some close family members. I’ll say I don’t feel like going. I feel alone.

· It takes me longer to do things and people are impatient. Why can’t they understand? I feel hurt.

· I had a tiny fender bender today. Will they let me keep on driving? Will I lose my freedom?

· When I am in a group, my words won’t come. I just keep quiet. I don’t feel like myself.

· I like to make things, read, take care of my garden, collect stamps, but I am frustrated because nothing seems to come out right. I get confused and angry.

· They expect me to be able to name the people in the pictures in this house. Most of them are unfamiliar. Why do they keep asking?

· I sometimes cannot sense when I need to go to the bathroom. They treat me like a child when this happens. Maybe I can work on ways to let them know when I have to go. I am not a child.

Eventually, as a family, we were able to hear with a third ear our own mother’s wishes:
When I forget,
Please remember who I am,
And help me find and be myself
As long as part of me remains.*

This is the mantle we accepted. We knew there is no cure, but we would find ways to connect and to enhance what remained of a caring and courageous woman.

*From Please Take Me Home Before Dark by Billie Pate with Mary Yarnell