Having had to deal with both my grandmother's "senility"* and my stepfather's Alzheimer's, I decided a while back that once I reach a certain age I'll have a bottle of poison on my bedside table with a note saying "If you don't remember while this bottle is here, take the contents". I don't want to go like they did.
*quotes because it's unclear just what happened. Not Alzheimer's since it came on suddenly, but was immediately after she was seen to suddenly collapse and have a broken hip when in her 80s. Could've been microstroke(s), could've been bad recovery from the hip and/or the operation, etc. but her mind and memory were mostly gone after she woke up from the operation and stayed that way until she died the better part of a decade later. Sufficiently bad that if she thought she recognized me at all, she thought I was my (same-named) father. And I was both her favorite grandkid and didn't look that much like Dad, in that I had glasses and facial hair and he'd had neither.
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Date: 2007-11-11 12:57 am (UTC)*quotes because it's unclear just what happened. Not Alzheimer's since it came on suddenly, but was immediately after she was seen to suddenly collapse and have a broken hip when in her 80s. Could've been microstroke(s), could've been bad recovery from the hip and/or the operation, etc. but her mind and memory were mostly gone after she woke up from the operation and stayed that way until she died the better part of a decade later. Sufficiently bad that if she thought she recognized me at all, she thought I was my (same-named) father. And I was both her favorite grandkid and didn't look that much like Dad, in that I had glasses and facial hair and he'd had neither.