Thursday, April 15, 2010

It's hard to cope with Alzheimer's

Alzheimer's is a most hideous disease, shocking to the moral sense with memory loss also associated with brain damage. One can look up the word Alzheimer's in the dictionary, but words are not enough to explain the disease. One must live with an Alzheimer's person. Notice I didn't say "patient," but "person," as most times the person who is suffering with the disease is hardly treated as a patient, but as someone to avoid.

It's hard to get help and understanding for the caretaker of an Alzheimer's person. One mostly gets "Tsk, tsk." That's as far as their sense of recognition really goes. "Love they neighbor as thyself" is mighty hard when your neighbor has to deal with living and living as an Alzheimer's person.

Try living with someone who is combative most of the time, and you never know when they're in their worst mood. Smile one second and cry the next, or sweet-talk to screaming. You must be very rich or to the point of being broke before there is any help for an Alzheimer's person to be looked upon as an "Alzheimer's patient." Where does one turn? Who cares? "Love thy neighbor" — oh, but you mean when all is going well.

Your neighbor is someone who sits next to you in church, rides with you on the bus taking you all to wherever. But people say, "Don't sit next to so-and-so, they're sort of different." The word is hard to say, but love and hate are so much alike as you're either judged by others in the blink of an eye.

God loves us no matter. We, the people, need others to find a way to love the "unlovable."

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