My mother has also been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. We received the news Friday evening via MyChart. I don’t think that’s the ideal way a physician should deliver bad news, but that’s neither here nor there. The diagnosis did confirm the mounting concerns we’ve had about our mom’s well-being.

Mom is quite frail. In the last few months, I’ve noticed that it is harder for her to put her thoughts into words. She repeats the same stories, and she doesn’t sleep well at night.

We have a lot of decisions to make. Should mom take one of the new Alzheimer’s medications? They do seem to slow the progress of the disease, but they can also have serious side effects. Does she need to move to assisted living. Would in-home care suffice for now? We’re leaning toward assisted living; mom is lobbying us to let her stay in her home. It’s difficult.

Mom told my brother that without independence, there is no life, only existence. It’s an understandable reaction. My brother cautioned me to have compassion for what she’s feeling. He’s right.

But her take on the situation is not accurate. Children aren’t independent, but they lead meaningful lives. We are legal guardians to our disabled son. His independence is more limited than other adults his age, but he lives a full life.

True be told, none of us are truly independent. God created us to rely on each other and help each other. We depend on others for the food we eat, the medicine we take, and the love we share. As we age, our need for others grows. So do the gifts we have to share. Mom repeats stories, but many of them are worth hearing again, like the one about how she and my uncle would walk unaccompanied to the movie theater on Saturday afternoons where they lost themselves in other worlds.

Mom doubts that we understand what she’s going through. I don’t understand, but at age 56, I can see it coming. I used to run, but my arthritic hip can’t take the pounding anymore. Now I walk, but I look wistfully at the runners who pass me in the park.

I have one niece who is starting college this fall (at N.C. State, no less!) and another who is contemplating law school. My daughter and her companion have moved from the Windy City to Washington state, where there are whales to watch and opportunities to continue their education. The world is their oyster! For me, to say that the world is my oyster would be a bit of an overstatement. As you age, certain doors close. That’s the way it is.

“The years of our life are threescore and ten, or even, by reason of strength, fourscore, yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away,” Moses prayed, in what sounds like a clear-eyed but melancholy moment. “All flesh is grass,” Isaiah prophesied. “The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.” Everything changes. Nothing stays the same.

We say that we have bodies, but we don’t say that we have minds. That’s because we equate the mind and its thoughts, feelings, and memories, with the Self. We are our minds. Jim Wright, a seminary classmate of mine and a gerontologist, has observed that what is terrifying about Alzheimer’s is that, in destroying our minds, Alzheimer’s makes us question if there is anything about us that is truly immortal.

According to Wright, when Paul wrote to the Corinthians about the resurrection, he didn’t say that our resurrected bodies would be enlivened by a soul, or what is called a psyche, in the Greek language. Rather, our resurrected life will be animated by the pneuma, or spirit, of God. Nothing about us is indestructible, Wright argues, neither our bodies, nor our minds, nor even the souls that enliven us fading flowers. Only when we make peace with that can we care for people who are losing their memories with the love and dignity they deserve.

But God is eternal. God remembers everything we forget, and God forgets what we would like to forget and often cannot: our sins (Jeremiah 31:34). We trust that God will speak a new, creative Word over us, a word filled with God’s life-giving Spirit. When we hear that Word, we will rise again.

Image Credit: Amyloid beta immunostaining showing amyloid plaques in brown. Amyloid plaques in the brain are associated with Alzheimer's Disease. Image By Nephron - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12274694