COLUMN: Learning to face death

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Alzheimer’s taught me living can be more terrible than dying.

My last grandparent, Blanche Nichols, died of it at our home this summer. She’d moved in with my parents about five years earlier after she could no longer survive alone. At 98, Alzheimer’s had eroded her mind of all ability.

Grandma couldn’t use stairs, couldn’t bathe herself, couldn’t cook for herself and didn’t know how to get the three sets of pills she took daily. She needed help dressing, walking, waking up, even sitting on the toilet. She had hallucinations, spastic mood swings and nightmares, which left her dazed, walking the halls at night like a phantom.

Then it came, that awful day when my beloved grandma looked at me and could not recognize who I was.

Alzheimer’s is a cruel disease that not only scars the victim, but also his or her family. I’ll never judge anyone for putting someone in a nursing home on account of it, but I know for us, we just couldn’t do it.

When grandma’s mental reasoning was still hers, she had signed a statement that she did not want any artificial life support should she become comatose; she wanted to die naturally, with dignity.

My dad reasoned that in a sense, shoving in tubes was not really saving grandma’s life, but only painfully prolonging her inevitable death. Although I accepted forcing grandma’s suffering body to stay alive would have only been a form of torture, it didn’t make watching her die any easier.

I was holding grandma’s yellow hand and caressing her paper-thin skin, when the angels took her that Sunday morning, July 3.

After years of our family helplessly witnessing Alzheimer’s break her body down, I admit we felt a sense of relief when it ended. Death had brought peace, not just for ourselves, but for her.

As I laid a bouquet of red roses on Grandma’s grave, I realized a day is coming when I’ll share her fate. None of us get out of this life alive. I looked in the mirror that night and said something to myself I don’t take to heart enough:

“You are going to die one day.”

Whatever does eventually take my life, even if it is Alzheimer’s, the experience of sharing death has prepared me to face it, when it does come, with hope.

I’ll see grandma again.

“To die will be an awfully big adventure.” -Peter Pan