Alzheimer's

I don't mean to be harsh but I was relieved when President Reagan died. I know too well the pain of watching a loved one with Alzheimer's degenerate. See, my mother suffered with Alzheimer's and her death from pneumonia, like Reagan's, was a great relief.

The parallels between Reagan's illness and my mother's have been on my mind for years now. Like Reagan my mother slowly degenerated from a vibrant person, through confusion (and in my mother's case fear), into non-recognition, then finally deeper into non-responsiveness, pneumonia and death. The whole time between Reagan's announcement of his illness and this weekend's events, I have been imagining the state of his illness, imaging the pain his family is experiencing, and hoping for a swift conclusion for all's sake.

To give you a taste for how terrible this illness is, I can recall on holiday where one of my sisters and I were discussing our recent visits to my mother's nursing home and we confessed to each other that we both had been dreaming about smothering our mother with a pillow in order to end her suffering. Neither of us is prone to summary action, this was just the result of having to watch someone you love suffer so greatly.

According to one of the Reagan's daughters, Ronald had a moment of seeming clarity before his death. He supposedly opened his eyes for the first time in a long time and looked at Nancy. I canÂ?t say the same for my mother. She passed in her sleep, at night, alone.