The Disease

When I was nine, my grandparents moved to live in the same city as my family. Two years later, we discovered Grandpa had Alzheimer’s Disease. None of us knew how it would affect us.

It chips away at the whole mind
And lets thoughts out through the holes.
It erases memories (faces, dates,
Sometimes his children’s names)
Whether they be new or old.

The outside looks the same
As any other who’s aged,
But the inside slowly crumbles away
And will never be seen again.
The empty shell is what we see,
Made up of his past and some personality.
It’s hard to remember
What he was before the disease.

It steals his abilities: to drive,
To cook, to clean, to focus.
Power tools are too dangerous,
Now that his motions are clumsy.
His tools lay unused in his shop
Coated with dust, waiting.

His wife grows weary
And sleeps more often.
She hates seeing him so weak,
Only part of a person.

His daughter takes on the role
Of caretaker and parent:
Balancing the checkbook, washing
Their sheets, their clothes,
Telling him he can’t drive
Even though he has
Since he was twelve.
She does everything for them
Until she can’t do anything for herself.
Her husband helps her
And supports her,
While her daughter does her schoolwork
And watches her grandpa disappear.

It’s not the disease that takes him,
It’s his heart that releases him.
It’s better this way, we tell each other,
Remember his sisters?
The final stages would have been hell.

He is gone,
But the disease still looms
On the horizon for us.
There’s my mother, 
A few decades
Later it could consume her.

And there’s me,
Who will handle things differently
Than my mother.
Because the disease devours
The whole family.