Category: Family

My mother died last Friday. She was 82 years old. She has had Alzeimer for several years and has been in a care home since June 2008. She had asthma for many years. She had been having increasing difficulty breathing and with that came a diagnosis of late stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. I visited…

In December last year I agreed to travel to Winnipeg to accompany my dad to the hospital for his surgery for hernia. He had the operation in January. It disrupted his routine of visiting mother in the nursing home for a few days, but he was back at it. He realized that his needs to…

My parents are getting old, and old age is not pretty. My mother has had Alzheimer disease or another form of progressive denile dementia for about 5 or 6 years, although it took some time for her physician to learn all the symptoms – my mother thought that it was in her interest to minimize…

Dad and I attended the Alzheimer Society workshop, called Living with Alzheimer Disease, on September 24 and Saturday October 1. It was scheduled for 10 hours over the two days, divided into 6 presentations or workshops. Dad and I went to all three sessions the first day and one session the second day. I had…

My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer Disease just before Christmas last year. She has been showing short-term memory loss, losing track of what she is doing and acting erratically for the last two to four years. My father has been trying to manage on his own and has been resisting involving the provincial Home Care…

N. is 18 today, and it has been more than two years since he ran away. I stopped writing about him in February. I stopped bargaining with him. I stopped responding to his demands and requests. I stopped trying to give him advice.

Claire turned 20 today. I continue to be amazed by her intellect and her talent, impressed by her increasing maturity and self-reliance. She has witnessed and tolerated my ups and downs for the last year. I love her dearly.

[Originally posted in Rise Again]. I haven’t posted in Rise Again since August. I used to post the news about n. here, but in September 2004 I started to post the news about n. in my public blog, A Sea of Flowers. If n. stays addicted, he will probably not care about my having written…

Over the last two weeks my relationship with n. has been reduced to picking him up, driving him around, buying him a few meals, and buying tobacco, groceries and few other articles to make his life at the Salvation Army a little easier. He has not been able to give up drugs and he is…

Getting back to n., and his latest stay in the hospital, here’s the rest of the story of the days between the start of his breakdown and his discharge from the psychiatric unit.