How many caregivers out there have noticed that some of your loved ones long time friends seemed to become real scarce after your loved one started showing signs of Alzheimer's or after the diagnosis came in? Did you ever wonder, why is that? The news media has made it pretty clear, Alzheimer's is not contagious, so they shouldn't be concerned about catching it. Could it be that they don't want their last memories of your loved one to be memories of an Alzheimer's victim? I feel that could be in some cases. One of my family members refused to go visit an old friend that was dying of cancer. He'd let it be known that he wanted his last memories of his old friend to be memories of the guy that rode the Harley to the bar and didn't leave until they threw him out. He didn't want to remember him as the guy that couldn't get out of bed to go to the bathroom without help. I think most of them stop coming around because they don't understand Alzheimer’s disease,fear of the unknown. One of Sues old friends is supposed to stop by tomorrow. Sometime while she is here I'm going to walk into the room their in to tell Sue about something I just read at the Alzheimer's Association web site. I'm thinking that if I do this every time one of them comes around they just might become curious enough to take the time to visit the site themselves.
God Bless America, God Save The Republic.
Partial Eclipse of the Brain
1 week ago
I definitely noticed people stopped visiting once my mom started getting worse. My best friend used to visit all the time and have tea with my mom when she was still living at home with me and her symptoms were mild. Once we moved my mom into a care facility, this friend never visited her once in the 6 years she was in care.
ReplyDeleteMy dad's side of the family never visited her. Ever.
Has happened to me and to many, many others that I knew who were very ill.
ReplyDeletePart of it is that others have their own greiving to do and just can't deal, part of it is selfishness, and I think the biggest part is fear of mortality. We can watch someone die in a movie, but to watch someone decline and die in real life is too scary...reminds us of our mortality. Our whole society is in denial about death, especially about those we know who are very ill and/or dying.
My charge, H, has a sister that lives nearby and his parents and other sister used to live in this area as well. I can count on the fingers of my two hands how many times over 10 years they came by to visit H.
I've got a post on this topic as well on my blog: http://asingleman.blogspot.com/2005/11/where-have-all-friends-gone.html
For this family, the visiting is difficult for us because my mother-in-law became agitated by the presence of "strangers." Before that manifestation set in, we visited as often as we could -- considering we are on the East Coast and she is on the West Coast.
ReplyDeleteSome other members of the family stopped visiting because my mother-in-law no longer had the power of the checkbook. Sad, but true: they visited only to get some money out of her. Over the course of the years, they took almost all of her liquid cash and even tapped into the real estate by getting her to sign some documents giving them that power. By the time the courts got around to addressing the situation, the property had liens against it, so my mother-in-law netted a very low amount.