The Early Symptoms

When dad passed away and the very short funeral was over, Mom was in no state to be left on her own. I stayed in the city with her, hours away from my own home and family. She still seemed to have more confusion than I'd expect, and she wouldn't eat, and she lied about it. At that point, I thought she was lying. It didn't take long before I realized she wasn't actually lying on purpose - she just didn't remember.

I knew she hadn't eaten because I'd been there all day trying to make her eat, yet she continued to insist that she had eaten. She proceeded to tell me what she'd eaten that day, except most of the things she mentioned were from days ago. Some of the food she mentioned, were not things my mother would ever have eaten. They were dad's favourites, which she hated.

She insisted that dad's things be removed, about a week later. I ended up doing that myself. She was immersed in the TV - in fact, that's all she ever did. She watched TV, but all the movies and all the programs she gravitated to were very old, from the 1940s to the 1960s and mostly westerns.

Packing up, I noticed that many of dad's things (his pants and shirts) were notclean. Checking the laundry bin and closet, it was obvious that laundry had not been done in...months was the best estimate I could give. The sheets on her bed hadn't been changed in longer than that, by the looks of them. I tossed those in the garbage, tears streaming down my face. I cried my heart out to think of my dad wearing dirty clothing because my mother wouldn't do the wash, and he didn't know how, I think. From the condition of a few pieces of clothing (both his and hers) I found, I think he tried at some point, but two of his wool shirts and a pair of pants looked as though they'd fit a child of 10.

I discovered many grocery receipts in my dad's pockets and nightstand. Most of them for things like whole cooked chickens, potato wedges and hot vegetables, hot pasta dishes or chicken wings from Zehrs and IGA, or fish and chips from the shop around the corner - it appeared that my mother had also stopped cooking meals for my dad. Being raised in an era where men weren't often taught to cook at home, my dad had minimal cooking resources of his own. I was horrified that my father had suffered this in silence, without a word to us and had tended to my mother's every need without complaint.

Besides these types of oddities, I noted things like a lack of the normal groceries mom would always have on hand, or the fact that she weighed about 80 pounds, rather than her average 130 pounds.

Over the course of a couple of weeks, she'd often ask where dad was, or if I had let Dottie out (that was their little dog, who was long dead by then) or any one of a number of other questions which confused me, over and over.

Having no internet connection at her place left me in a spot where I couldn't even look up some of what I was seeing as symptoms. I took her home with me for a couple of days. Besides the most obvious (alzheimer's) there were other diseases and illnesses that could cause these symptoms - most notable for me was malnutrition. Because she certainly was malnourished.