After your loved one leaves you, you wish you could hear them call your name one last time. It’s hard to accept their death at first, but with time you learn to live your life by cherishing their memories and looking back at the good times you spent with them.
You open their wardrobe and look at all the clothes they used to wear. Their favorite pair of pants stare back at you. You open another drawer and notice a white piece of paper sitting on top of the clothes. You open it, and tears start rolling down your cheeks. Your loved one left a note for you before they died.
A woman on Reddit opened up about losing her mother because of dementia. She was looking after her mother for 20 years and saw her struggle with dementia for the last five years of her life. It wasn’t easy for her to watch her go through the worst phase of her life.
After her death, the daughter visited her house and discovered notes left by her mother in different places around the house. She knew her daughter would visit her home, and these heartwarming notes would make her feel better. One of the notes said, “Last will & testament: I trust you, and I love you!”
It isn’t easy for people to watch their loved ones struggle with dementia, especially when it’s their mother. It breaks your heart to see the woman who gave birth to you and held your hand through the most challenging stages of your life now struggling to form a sentence. Another Redditor commented:
“My grandmother got to a point where she didn’t recognize my mom at her present age, and thought that I was my mother instead (at a younger age). So I felt glad that in a roundabout way she still remembered my mom (especially since she had forgotten me years before). Dementia is awful. Sorry OP”
Dementia attacks your brain and plays with your memory. You start forgetting small things like what you had for dinner last night and ultimately fail to recognize the people you spent your entire life with. It’s like having a stranger’s soul trapped inside your body. You become a new person emotionally and mentally.
Dementia seeps into your life and gradually affects your brain, making you forget things from your past. At first, it might seem like you have become a forgetful person, but later on, you realize that there’s something wrong with your brain.
Dementia isn’t just about forgetting things and not knowing what happened last month. People who are diagnosed with dementia are no longer the person they used to be. It changes their personality, and it can have a devastating effect on their family. Seeing the person you love lose their identity is heartbreaking.
A Redditor posted that it’s painful to watch dementia gradually take over her mother’s life. Her 57-year-old mother was diagnosed with dementia in 2016, and she posted it on Reddit in 2019. Her mother keeps on talking about the weather every day because she has forgotten about everything else.
The Redditor was planning to call the doctor for a euthanasia declaration because she remembered her mother telling her that she didn’t want to reach the point in her life where she didn’t recognize people around her. It was a tough decision for her, and she felt ashamed.
She wrote: “It’s hard for me to remember my mom. My real mom, not this person who’s wearing her skin. I miss her so much it physically hurts. She’s right there!!!! But I can’t reach her or talk to her.”
The Redditor hasn’t updated the post for two years, and we don’t know about her mother’s current condition. However, from the post, we can see how difficult it was for her to see her mother slowly lose her identity.