Justice Hard To Find In Response To Major Diseases

Mothers, especially when they get older, do silly things. One of the silly things mine did was leave her pocketbook on the counter at the grocery store. She kept losing her glasses. We cautioned her not to be so careless.

Sometimes she called to say her car wouldn’t start. Most of the time it was easy to figure out why. She forgot to put the gear shift in park. She never was a very good driver.

When we went to pick her up to go to a cousin’s wedding, we noticed she’d forgotten to put on the belt that went with her dress. Her hair wasn’t combed. She probably got late and had to rush.

She found excuses not to cook. Our invitations to those big Sunday dinners, when she cooked everything my boys and I loved to eat, began to go away. We missed the fried chicken and egg custards, her specialties, but we understood. She’d done her share of cooking. She deserved a break.

Pots and pans disappeared from her kitchen. She probably carried them to a church dinner and a neighbor took them home by mistake.

Her bank account got mixed up, but then whose doesn’t? One afternoon she drove to visit a friend. Driving back, she got turned around and had to stop at somebody’s house to ask the way home.

That’s when we decided she ought to see a doctor. She agreed, and they gave her all kinds of tests. They didn’t find anything wrong.

We were relieved, and so was she. “I was worried,” she admitted on the way home. “Last week I forgot Robby’s name.” Rob is her grandson.

She agreed to slow down, give up some of her activities, and pay more attention to little things, like bringing her pocketbook home from the grocery store and taking time to dress properly for a wedding. She said she wanted to start back cooking Sunday dinners. She never did.

She spent most of her time trying to keep bugs out of her house. When I went to check, the bugs were in hiding. But bugs do that. So we called an exterminator. The exterminator didn’t find any bugs, either. One morning I stopped by for coffee and she was wearing her dress wrong side out.

My mother has Alzheimer’s, a progressive brain disease that destroys memory, the ability to think, to talk, to walk. There is no known cure, no effective medication.

People over 65 are usually the victims, but it can strike as early as 30. Four million Americans have it. Former President Ronald Reagan is one of them.

Some people say the disease is harder on families and caretakers than on victims. I doubt it, although in the midstages it’s nerve-racking to answer the same question 10 times in two minutes, especially when the question from your mother is: “Do I have a son?”

After my mother went to the nursing home (and thank God for the one we have in Fayetteville) I solved the mystery of her missing pots and pans. They were in the shrubbery in the back yard, where she had hidden them when she burned something on the stove trying to cook her breakfast or our Sunday dinner.

I also solved another mystery. We had wondered why she stopped sending our son at the university a small monthly check, which she had delighted in doing. Her desk was full of spoiled checks she had tried to write but never was able to complete.

My father died of a heart attack 28 years ago. I remember him well, as he was. My mother is alive, but I have a hard time remembering her as she was.

It’s hard to remember she taught fifth grade all those years, superintended the Sunday school, wrote chapters for the county history book, spearheaded Red Cross blood drives, made speeches, figured her own income tax, and cooked the best fried chicken and made the best pies I’ve ever eaten.

Maybe that’s the reason I’m a little touchy about all the attention and money lavished on AIDS, which can be avoided, compared with a pittance for Alzheimer’s, which can’t be avoided.

Maybe that’s why I’m not enthusiastic when a local government can find funds for ball fields and can’t find any to help families and victims of a terrible disease that does worse than kill.

That’s why I’m angry when county commissioners turn their backs on a modest Alzheimer’s center being displaced by a Holiday Inn.

Fayette County, about the richest in the state, can’t come up with $40,000 to renovate a new site. Like Commissioner Linda Wells says, the county can’t provide funding for all the worthy nonprofit programs in the county.

The Fayette center, run by Visiting Nurses, has provided day care for patients three days a week for 50 families. “For people who keep Alzheimer’s victims in the home a free day is like a Florida vacation,” says one who has tried it. Contrary to popular opinion, not everybody in Fayette County is rich. Not everybody can afford a nursing home or 24-hour hired help.

I wouldn’t say commissioners who refuse a pittance to help an Alzheimer’s center are insensitive, or uncaring, or Republican mean-spirited. I think it’s just that they, and a lot of other folks, don’t really understand what Alzheimer’s does to victims and their families, and how badly they need help.

Someday they may understand. More that half of us will have it by the time we reach the age of 85, and people are living a long time these days.

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