The Day the Journey Began

Written by: Matt Tullis

Life changed for my family at a shower. Not in a shower but at one. Showers are usually a place for fun and celebration. At this particular gathering to celebrate new beginnings, my family and I were about to experience our own new beginning but it was not something to celebrate.

It was 2018. My mother, my sister and her daughter were at a family friend’s house for a bridal shower. When I started writing this, I actually couldn’t remember if it was a bridal shower or a baby shower which really drove home the point that all of our memories are imperfect. The conversation turned to babies, a popular topic at these types of showers. Someone asked my mother what she thought of her newest grandchild, born just two years earlier. She responded, dead serious and with a very pointed tone “How would I know? He hasn’t even been born yet”.

Now my family is quite accustomed to dry humor, sarcasm, and teasing in the name of fun. So the first response from my niece was something along the lines of “Yeah right!,” but the look on my mom’s face was odd. She was visibly confused. She had remembered that my brother and sister-in-law were having a boy, but not that he had been born. This look and this kind of response was something we would become quite familiar with over time.

Quickly, it became clear to my niece that my mom really didn’t have any recollection of ever meeting my nephew even though she had seen him only a few weeks earlier. What should have been a joyful, significant memory was simply gone. Sensing something was seriously off, my sister took mom straight to the hospital to get checked out.

We were told that mom had a brain aneurysm that had affected her short term memory, causing temporary amnesia for a time frame of about a week. While scared and sad, we were relieved to think this was only a temporary situation that could be managed by avoiding things that caused high blood pressure and other stressors that had caused the aneurysm in the first place. Unfortunately, that would not be the case.

Over the following years, my mom showed increasing signs of memory loss and confusion. Looking back, it’s far more obvious now than it was at the time. It’s easier to spot that look she had at the shower in some of our family photos. My mother's life changed forever. All of our lives had changed forever. Now we needed to figure out how to manage things moving forward.

This journey that my family was beginning is all of our journeys in this world of living with dementia.

Next: When Stepping Up Means Falling In