Lauren Flake - Grief & TexasI lost my mother to early onset Alzheimer’s disease when she was 59.
This will be my tenth Mother’s Day since my mother died. When Mother’s Day is hard because you lost your mom Every day has felt like Mother’s Day since my mother’s diagnosis with Alzheimer’s disease in May, 16 years ago. Honoring and protecting her became my life’s work during her illness. Now that she is […]
My mother left her mark on everything she touched before she died. She’s been gone for almost a decade. Early onset Alzheimer’s disease took her from me. But I still find signs of my mother everywhere I look. My mother left her mark on everything she touched before she died. I still find her handwriting […]
The expected death of a loved one still hurts terribly. My mother lived with early onset Alzheimer’s disease for over a decade. She lived in a nursing home with advanced dementia for almost five years. And she lived on hospice care for two years. I prepared for her death for years. I was relieved, of […]
We were originally supposed to get married in May of 2008. But, when it was clear that my mother’s early onset Alzheimer’s disease was progressing rapidly, we moved the wedding up by four months. I’m happy she still knew I was her daughter at my wedding despite Alzheimer’s disease. Fifteen years ago today, on January […]
Today would’ve been my parents’ 45th wedding anniversary. It is difficult to write about my parents’ marriage before Alzheimer’s when my mother has been dead for 9 years and my father has remarried twice since then. My parents had an Aggie romance. They met at Texas A&M through a mutual friend. Their first date was […]