An Essay: Why the Alzheimer’s Association means so much to me

CHARLOTTE (QUEEN CITY NEWS) – For my job, I get to interview people all the time. This one was different and that’s because the interviewee was my Dad and the topic was how Alzheimer’s and Dementia forever changed our family.

My Nana Gene, Gene Behrmann, was the matriarch of our family. The very glue that held us all together, as a kid, and even as an adult there was nothing like a hug and kiss from her.

“So she felt a role that was important to be kind of all-encompassing, to be the greatest grandparent that she could, and to know that all three of you, you and your two siblings had that kind of love,” said Brian Sadur, my dad. “That is a very, very special love and she had reservoirs of it.”

To me she was everything, but to my dad, she was his best friend. For 35 years the two would share a call nightly usually around 11.

“Every day was an opportunity just to say, ‘hi, mom, I love you. I miss you and I’ll see you soon,” said my Dad.

When the pandemic hit my Dad being semi-retired, made it his full-time job to check in on her driving from Maryland to Florida every month to keep her company. It was a chance to spend quality time with her when the world shut down. As beautiful as that was unbeknownst to us something uglier was brewing, the early signs of a sinister disease.

“Mom, that card doesn’t go there. Don’t tell me I’ve got it’ and so she was very good because she was so intelligent with masking parts of dementia that I couldn’t recognize,” said my Dad.

With my Nana being 97, my dad would chalk up the lapses in memory to her age. It wasn’t until three years later that things would start to take a turn.

Shortly after her 100th birthday Nana fell in the kitchen and ended up needing surgery on her back. Although the surgery was successful, it sped the dementia up at a rapid rate. Seemingly even faster our world with her began to crumble.

My dad turned into her primary caregiver and the Nana we knew, the world traveler, the one who read books by the dozen each month, the one who seemed to have it all together, now did not. She began to summon my dad to her room several times a night,  seemingly lost each time he arrived.

“The wall is closing in on me! Am I okay? Did I just go to the bathroom? Yes, yes, and yes. Mom and I would stand there and cry in the dark because it hurt me so much to see her decline,” my Dad said.

Thankfully we weren’t alone. My dad and I both got involved with the Alzheimer’s Association. He did in Florida and I did the same here in Charlotte. Those resources helped immensely in battling and answering the tough questions.

“Should we put her in a facility or hire help?”

“How much is this going to cost and can we afford it?”

The Alzheimer’s Association community, along with family and friends provided the support needed to get through the worst part of this disease.

“The hardest part is watching somebody you love, someone who you’re in contact with every day to watch them slip away. To be aware that there’s nothing you can do, that there’s only one endpoint. So you’re basically enjoying or trying to savor each day while you know that one day it’s the last day,” said my Dad.

So savor is what we did. The grandchildren visited. We relished the moments when there was clarity and for my Dad, he stayed the course right up until the end, as he had done with his sister his dad, and now his mom.

“I’m kind of like the last person standing, but if it was anybody that could be with her, it was me,” said my Dad.

“My biggest promise was that I would not have let her be alone.”

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