The Day I Found My Mother Dead after Alzheimer’s Disease

I will never forget the moment I walked in to find my mother had taken her last breath.

I stopped in my tracks on the nursing home’s linoleum floor, asking my father, who was right behind me, “Is she dead?” Slowly, I backed away, up against the wall across from her bed, as I stared at her lifeless body in disbelief. It took me weeks to get the image of my dead mother, complete with an inconsiderate fly alighting on her face, out of the forefront of my mind.

That day was the culmination of a decade of suffering, in which I had watched my mother succumb to the effects of early onset Alzheimer’s disease in her fifties.

She lost her words, then her memories, then her relationships, then her independence, and finally, she lost her life. I had been preparing for her death for months, and thanks to her hospice nurse I knew it was coming that week. Yet her passing still hit me like a ton of bricks.

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