The Memories

By Clare Page f10

Dementia
Sends shivers down my back.
She's losing it
The doctor says
We can't ever get it back
The sunsets
The walks on the beach
Time she spent with her husband
children
grandchildren
friends.
Where does it all go?
I'm afraid we don't have the answers
to why she can't live alone.

She'd love having her family around her
constantly
But not knowing who she is
who she was
Why she isn't the way she used to be
Hurts.

The anger, passion, loss, anguish
won't ever make anything better.
Watching her slowly deteriorate
can't ever make it right.

What if Dr. Alzheimer never found it?
Who am I to question fate
but the grandchild of a woman
who suffers
while her family watches helplessly?

She doesn't recognize any of us
Doesn't know she has Alzheimer's.
We can't deny it.

But she can't help that
the woman I used to know
is only a shell.
I want to take her
and refill her
with all the old memories.

But it's impossible now.
We can only fill her with new ones
and watch them drift away
like filling a sieve
A hopeless task.

But does it make it better?
any more bearable?
We can't lose her anymore
than we already have.
Can we?

It's like watching a speeding train coming at you
You can't stop it
there's nothing you can do to change its course.
Yet it is only slowly
that she loses the memories she had
until all the lost memories have gathered in a pile
and it makes you cry
Because she has lost so much
and doesn't even realize it.

The sands of time have erased
the footprints at the beach.
The afternoons we spent outside
in the backyard.

I know somewhere
they are hidden
All her old memories will come back someday.
We know that it won't happen soon
or maybe ever.
But like the lighthouse in the harbor
There is still a flicker of hope.