I'm not...

I'm not as young as I was yesterday; and I was older then than the day before that.
One of my favorite rants is that I hope I get to Heaven because I want to talk to God about engineering. It seems bitterly unfair to me that my body wears out one thing at a time. It would be so much cleaner if we just fell to pieces all at once, like the "One Hoss Shay".*
This latest complaint has two sources. First, I injured my knee slightly a couple of days ago. That sort of thing used to heal in a couple of hours. But here it is two days later and the darned thing still hurts. It makes me limp when I walk. I hate that. And that is not the only thing that is wearing or has worn out. The second is, for me, really scary. I was talking to my wife this morning. It took me three tries to get a very simple point across. Afterwards I realized that she was not to blame. I had been vague and had not said exactly what I was trying to make her understand. I'm losing my communications skills. Hey, that's really frightening for a guy who wants to write.
My mother-in-law (That's her picture at the head of this post.) had Alzheimer's Disease. It was painful to watch a witty, sophisticated woman disappear, one memory at a time. The first thing we noticed gone were words. She began to call almost any animal a squirrel. Of course by that time, her short term memory was already shot. She hardly remembered what had been said at the beginning of a conversation. That meant we heard the same story often. I'm not complaining about that. She was a talented story teller. She was very good at compensating for memory loss. If you met her then, you would have thought her normal during a short conversation. We were lucky enough to care for her during six months of her illness. She was mobile and enjoyed travelling with us although she would often remark that she remembered a road that none of us had ever travelled.
I'm pretty sure that the regimen we used for her kept her going longer than another might have. After my wife helped her dress, we would have breakfrast. She had always been careful about her weight, but the combination of her disease and age reduced her appetite to the point we gave her nutritional drinks as often as she would take them. After breakfast, I would take her for a walk along our street. We walked up to three miles each morning; less if she felt tired. She would talk to me about her family and marriage. I loved that.
But in the normal course of Alzheimer's, she began to lose people. She addressed her grandchildren as if they were her children. She became increasingly concerned about getting lost. Our son is six feet four inches (96cm) tall. When we went into crowded places, Mother would cling to his arm. She said that holding onto the tallest thing in the crowd would allow us to find her no matter what. She began to wander, mostly in the house and we had to put up barriers to prevent her from falling down stairs or into the garage. She would not go outside without one of us because she was afraid of getting lost.
Dementia can effect people in different ways. The books we read on the subject warned us that her temperament might change, that she might get mean, irritable, even destructive. None of those things happened. Mother never was less than pleasant, never raised her voice or displayed any temper. I wondered if inside, she was fretting at her innability to tell us everything she wanted to say. It is more comforting to believe that she was as happy as she seemed.
Toward the end of her life, she didn't recognise any of her family except her husband. Him, she knew up to the day she died. He died soon after she did and they are buried side by side in the little prairie cemetary below the church they attended almost every week they were married.
Getting back to ME. I fear losing my memories and depending on others for everything. I fear becoming an inarticulate burden on my family. Dying is easy. But being so sick that I can't take care of myself, in unremitting pain that robs me of any other thought or emotion is terrifying.