My great-great-grandmother Lucinda Clark was born in Kentucky in 1845. Her family relocated to Illinois when she was about 11 years old. She married a dude named Andrew Theodore Hefley, and they had a bunch of children. She died in 1934 at the age of 88 in the state mental hospital in Jacksonville, to which she had been committed five years before, suffering from what they used to call senile dementia.
Her granddaughter Blanche Alberta Hefley, who was my grandmother, suffered basically the same fate. She spent the last ten years of her life in a nursing home drifting further and further off into La-La-Land until she finally died in 1985 at the age of 86. The last time I visited her there, one of the nurses said that they weren't sure where her mind had taken her, but wherever she was, she must have been having fun because she laughed all the time.
So, it looks like my grandmother Blanche and her grandmother Lucinda both had what we would now call Alzheimer's Disease. It also seems to be skipping a generation, in which case -- I'm next. Crap.
Alzheimer's seems to be affecting more and more people. So sorry to hear that ir runs in your family - a very sad disease!
ReplyDeleteThe positive side for your family (if there is one) is that it seems to set in when you're much older. For my best friend's family it started getting really bad in each person in their late forties. By the time they were in their mid fifties they had passed on.