My mother had Alzheimer’s disease. Her last three years was spent in a nursing home. For most of that time she was unaware of her surroundings. She did not speak at all. When I visited her she was unaware of my presence. When awake she simply stared into space. Sadly she was a vegetable. She died two months before he 96th birthday. She was a smart woman who graduated cum laude from college at 20 years old. She taught school for almost 20 years and traveled in her retired years to many parts of the world.
The question is why do we sustain the life of someone who will never recover from a disease?
This topic was brought up again by this article in the February 1, 2021 issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek. The article is titled “how I helped my dad die”
The article is engrossing. You might cry. It starts with these words:
I was finishing up breakfast in New York when my dad sent me a text message. He was ready to die, and he needed me to help.
The request left me shaken, but that’s different than saying it came as a shock. I’d begun to grasp that something was really wrong 10 months before, in May 2019, when he’d come to California from Maine. He was there to meet his first granddaughter, Fern, to whom I’d recently given birth. But he couldn’t bend down to pick her up. He was having trouble walking, and he spoke of the future in uncharacteristically dark terms. We’d traveled to see him in Maine four times since then, and each time he’d looked older: his face more gaunt, his frame more frail.
The entire article is worth your time. Here is the link. “how I helped my dad die”
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