I cried some this week. I let go of some plans, some dreams, and some stuff I’d imagined a certain way. And on top of all that, I lost another piece of my mom.

The Slow Fade of Dementia

My mom has dementia. I’m losing her a few bits at a time.

This week, she forgot how to swallow pills. She now takes them crushed up and hidden in a bite of pudding. I hope the pills don’t ruin pudding for her. Chocolate pudding is one of three foods she eats happily. The others are bananas and tomato soup. She lost her love for food a while back.

You probably had to be there in the house of my mother to understand why this thing with the pills devastated me like it did.

My mom was the queen of vitamins. She single-handedly put Jack Lalanne, Amway, Shaklee, and Dr. Whitaker in new tax brackets. If you don’t recognize all those names, just know this: mom was a vitamin junky, and they were her dealers.

She could down a fistful of horse pills with a single swallow of water. And she did, every single day.

She “fixed” a month’s worth of pills ahead of time—counting them out into baby food jars, because no pill organizer was big enough. My sister and I guess-timate that mom took somewhere between 15-40 vitamins a day (depending on how much we exaggerate). She didn’t always know what each pill was purported to accomplish, but once it was on autoship, she dutifully counted it into her jars.

Family legend has it that there was an orange vitamin that was over an inch long. I don’t miss those vitamins.

I do grieve one more inch of my mom that is gone.

What is this grief?

I’ve done some time with grief. I took one seminary class on it, and I’ve been up close and personal with it more than once.

I’ve grieved the natural losses of grandparents and my father and the tragic losses of friends who seemed to die too young of cancer, heart conditions, and car wrecks. Hurricane Katrina took my home, possessions, and my naive assumption that my life plans could not be overturned. When my husband died from suicide, my grief was all over the charts—traumatic, disenfranchised, secondary loss, cumulative, and more. The official name for it is complicated. That’s the name. Complicated Grief.

I’m not a grief expert. But I’ve known grief.

But this present inch-by-inch grief? I don’t have words to wrap around it.

I’ve heard dementia called “death in slow motion.” Grief experts call the grief associated with it “anticipatory grief.”

Can I be real for a minute? That term is too tidy for me. Grieving now feels like burying my mom while she’s still alive.

The proper order of grief

Grief is supposed to happen in a certain order. I don’t mean the so-called “stages” of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I felt all those things in grief—but not in stages. When I grieve, I do it all at once. I’m a big old tangled up mess of feelings. Anyway, that’s not what I mean when I say proper order.

I mean this. First comes death. Then comes grief.

You lose a whole person. You grieve a whole person. As time passes, you might grieve his laugh, her smell, the cup of coffee he made you each morning, and more. Normal grief grieves the whole, then the parts.

With dementia, grief is out of order.

I can see my mom and hold her. But parts of her disappear almost every day. And I grieve each one.

On Saturday, mom laughed and talked with some friends. One friend was an everyday friend. The other was a once-every-few-years friend. As they teased, mom not only recognized the occasional friend, she called her by name. She was firing on a lot of synapses.

It was all gone on Tuesday. She was weak, fuzzy, and just wanted to sleep. We thought she was sick. So we poked, prodded, and ran tests. Turns out, she wasn’t sick. She’d just progressed. To another stage of dementia.

I sat by her bedside, held her warm hand in mine, and grieved the parts I’d lost. Out of order was the order of the day.

Come Alongside

This is usually the part of a post where I make an application and a call to action. I like to end with a way to move forward. But, that’s the thing about walking through death in slow motion. Moving forward is seldom an option.

I ran into mom’s friend at the grocery store today. She said she was sad. I said I was sad. We talked about how much we love my mom. We hugged.

Your Come Alongside call to action is to Grieve. And know that you are not alone.

The Lord is near to the brokenhearted
    and saves the crushed in spirit.

PSALM 34:18 (ESV)

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.

2 CORINTHIANS 1:3-5

Grieve. Know you’re not alone. And above all, love. You can’t fix things. But you can love.

Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience,  bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful.

COLOSSIANS 3:12-15 (ESV)

If you need a friend in grief, or just some comfort and prayer, let me know in the comments. I’d love to come alongside!

Traveling in Grace,

Christi