Team Website
I am captaining a team in honor of my Grandma - Helen Ely who passed away last September.
If anyone is interested in joining my team and walking with us, please let me know! You can follow the link above to go to my team page and join my team.
If you don't want to or can't walk with us and want to make a donation in her honor, you can do that by following the above link also!
This is a cause very close to my heart. People don't talk a lot about Alzheimer's Disease and its hard to really understand what its like until you have lived through it. When you think about a family that loses a loved one to Cancer or another lengthy illness you think about how awful it was for the family to watch their loved one suffer for so long. I feel like a lot of people forget that its the same drawn out, horrible experience when you lose a loved one to Alzheimer's. Trust me, I'm not suggesting that one is worse or better than the other, lets face it - both are heartwrenching!
When someone is dying of Alzheimer's its hard for the family because there isn't ever a time to say "goodbye". The fact is you can live with Alzheimer's for years like my Grandma did. But for the family, even though they are still "living" they are already gone and you are trying to cope with that while at the same time caring for the patient who is technically still "living". It can really rip you apart when you hate to see them at the nursing home without visitors when at the same time if you do go they don't know who you are. You have to decide if its better to try to tell them who you are or just let them believe you are a stranger that they have never met. My Grandma got to the point where she didn't even know that she had ever had children. Its shocking how your mind can just erase all your memories from your life like that.
I'm going to continue to do posts about my Grandma and about other people who I know that have been affected by this disease in the future, just look for the "Helen's Heroes" label! And please visit my Team Page for the Walk to End Alzheimer's.
