For fifteen years

I watched my great-grandmother's decline from Alzheimer's. But I wasn't her primary caregiver; that was my grandmother, her daughter, who was a registered nurse. So I didn't see her day in and day out. But every holiday I was there, and whenever I could get away from school and work. The changes were probably more apparent to me then. My great-grandmother went from being a vibrant, feisty woman to someone who thought the people on the TV were taking her on joyrides, to finally being uncommunicative and trapped in her own strange thoughts. She needed constant care, and my grandmother provided it. As sometimes happens, she became lucid right before death, and sadly, by the time my great-grandmother died in 1991, my grandmother, worn out from caregiving, was battling lung cancer, and outlived her mother by only a couple of years.

Even though it's been so many years, the pain of seeing what Alzheimer's did to my family is still very fresh in my mind and emotions. It is a horrible disease, and the Baby Boomer generation is poised to be the largest to suffer it of all, a generation already 'sandwiched' between truly elderly parents and their kids. And their kids, my generation, will be caring for the Boomers who have it. My own fear is that I will get it. Some have linked diabetes to it, for example, and I am diabetic, as is most of my family. It's a shadow hanging over us. Granted, my great-grandmother was on my father's side; I pretty much just have my mother's side of the family left. But still....

So this story brought up memories:

Celebrating Thanksgiving with 'Generation Alzheimer's'

Judy Warzenski didn't realize how bad her father, Donald's, memory had gotten until he turned to her sister Joyce and asked, "Where's the girl who was sitting next to you?" He did not recognize Joyce as his own daughter.

This Thanksgiving, Warzenski and her younger siblings will eat Thanksgiving dinner with their father in a private dining room at a nursing home in Pennsylvania. Moving her father there in October was an agonizing decision.

"It's really very upsetting to me," said Warzenski, 62, of central New Jersey. "I promised him I would never do this. I promised him I would never put him in a nursing home, which I've come to realize is an unrealistic promise."

For all those families touched by Alzheimer's, spend time with your loved one as much as you can, before they slip away. And you will be in my thoughts....