Living with Dementia

Great grandma was ‘funny in the head’ and was taken to a mental asylum, where she died at 80. Her daughter, my grandmother, began to show signs of dementia between the ages of 60 and 65. She declined over the years and spent her last five years in a nursing home like a vegetable, where she died at 81. Her daughter, my mother has followed the exact same pattern. We had to put her in a nursing home and she will be 80 this year. She’s only partly there…her personality is just a shell now.

Grandmother did not have Alzheimer’s. Mother does not have it, but her brain scan shows multiple infarcts. She has none of the predisposing factors for vascular dementia–was trim, fit, active, healthy eater, no smoking or drinking, normal blood pressure and cholesterol. My sister and I are 60 and 61 and are searching and searching for answers, but this kind of early onset, hereditary dementia seems rare, if indeed it exists elsewhere.

Needless to say, we are terrified of the prospects of this happening to us…going thru this with grandma and now mom has been hell, for us and them. There is nothing worse on this earth. Imho we need to be able to have the choice to select a legal, dignified death to escape from the horrors of years of living hell that this disease imposed on my loved ones and me. There’s absolutely no sense in remaining alive like that.