Many of you may not know something significant about November. To me, it’s not just a month where college students get a week off to eat as much as they want in preparation for Thanksgiving. November is also National Alzheimer's Disease Awareness Month. Alzheimer's disease is something that affected my family.
My grandmother was not only my best friend, but also the most giving and kindhearted person I have ever met. She always put other people before herself, especially me. We did everything together, from baking cookies to making bracelets to watching endless amounts of Disney Channel TV shows. But before I knew it, Alzheimer’s slowly started taking control of my best friend, and it turned her into a different person.
It’s hard to understand what it’s like to watch someone you know so well turn into someone you don’t recognize. Before the disease took over, my grandmother would never raise her voice or do anything less than smile. As the Alzheimer’s progressed, however, my mother and I started to become the target of her mood swings. She would constantly lash out at us, thinking that we were someone from her childhood or her sister.
At the time, I was only a sophomore in high school. I was old enough to understand, but young enough to not be able to deal with it. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that my best friend no longer knew who I was. I didn’t want to accept that my grandmother was not the same person she used be — someone who made me laugh and smile, and someone who made me the happiest, luckiest granddaughter. By the time I was a senior in high school, my grandmother was convinced that I was her childhood best friend. She would ask me if I remembered specific people from high school or even college. I would play along because I knew that reminding her about her disease would only cause her to become upset.
Eventually, Alzheimer’s took away my grandmother's ability to speak, eat and walk. She would constantly sleep for hours on end. And when she did get up, she would just sit in silence or attempt to speak, but it never made sense. On Aug. 7, 2013, 10 days before I left for my freshman year of college, I received a phone call that would forever change my life. My parents told me I needed to come to the hospital, because my grandmother had taken a bad fall and it wasn’t looking too good. That day, my best friend was taken from me without a goodbye.
From that day forward, I’ve lived my life doing things that I know would make her proud. She wouldn’t expect me to continue dwelling on the fact that she was taken from me; she would expect me to fulfill my dreams. After reading this, I hope that next time you walk by a person fundraising for Alzheimer’s, you'll stop and take a second to take out some of the spare change from your wallet. You may be helping someone who is losing his or her best friend like I did.
