The Long Goodbye.

Thanks for the messages of support, they do help me to not feel so alone in all this. The last few weeks have been very difficult. I think I needed to have a 'mini-meltdown'... I have just been keeping it together for so long now that something had to give.

Being sick and unable to do anything was the final straw. Without me to take care of mum, this is just too hard. It showed me just how much I actually do for mum, and what that is costing my family.

I have finally had a good cry about a lot of things and I am sure there are more tears in store.The truth is that my mother is dying a little bit each day and I can't do a damned thing to stop it. My 'real' mum is gone, there are only glimpses of her now.

I have done a lot of thinking over the last couple of weeks and come to the decision that I need to place mum in care. This has not been easy believe me. My health and family are suffering. I have never had as many stress related health problems as I have in the last year. My doctor keeps telling me I have to take better care of myself or I will become ill.

I think back to the mum I knew, and I know she would not want this for me, or for my family. You see my mum never had a happy marriage. We did not have the safe and loving family life that my husband and I have created for our children.

If I could go back and talk to my 'real' mum I do know what she would want for me. And it is not this. She would be devastated to think that she was having this effect on me and my life. My 'real' mum was so proud of my study and my career. I was the first person in my family to finish high school. Mum always told me to " Dream big!" and then go out and make it happen. I think that she wanted me to achieve things that she never had the opportunity to do.

If I could talk to my 'real' mum right now and get her advice, she would tell me to make sure that she was clean and well dressed, and looked after properly and then go and get on with my life.

She would tell me to do back to university, work hard and make a difference in the world, that God gave a talent and I have a responsibility to use it. She would tell me to go out and achieve my 'big dream' and don't let anything stop me, even her growing old and frail. "We all have to die sometime!"she would say.

Mum believed in my work, and she beamed with pride at my every achievement for my whole life. You see for her generation of women there were limited choices. She used to to tell me that she was a quiet and timid person, a follower not a leader. That as a mother, she had always tried to encourage me to believe women could do anything, even though she herself had struggled. She has always been a very dependent, passive person, but she still always pushed me to succeed.

That is the mother I grieve for, that is who I miss. I want to remember and savour all those old conversations we used to have, the good and the bad. I need to remember the person my mum was before this horrible disease started ravaging her mind, stealing it away and changing her into a needy, sometimes petulant child.

In the last few weeks I let myself go back and remember her and I had those conversations with her in my mind. I asked what to do and then I listened.....How I wish I could have those talks in real life....

Now that I have my answers I have made arrangements for the aged care assessments and papers. I have contacted the homes and got application forms. I talked with mum about her moving back to the town she grew up in so she can be near her sister and her old friends. She was very happy with that idea. So we both cried then.

You see it kind of keeps hitting you, out of the blue, all over again that we have limited time together to stay our goodbyes. So many things that we do I later realise that it was 'the last time' we will ever do that together. I just didn't know it when I was doing it. A couple of months ago I took mum for trip to see the house she lived in a a child and I took her photo in front it it. It was the last time she will go there.....

This is what I have been avoiding feeling, the long goodbye of dementia. But I am glad that she understood when I spoke to her about moving into a home. I know that I have made the right decision for all of us. I know that my 'real' mum would be OK with this. In fact she would be pushing me to get on with it, and bragging about me to her friends.

It's OK mum, I can hear you again now...