My Mother Is Slipping Away

My mother can still pick up a spoon. That’s something, I guess. She can lift it, maybe guide it to her mouth if the stars align, but that’s about it. Moving herself in a chair? Forget it. Walking? Barely, even with the walker. And her words—what’s left of them—mostly come out as low, tangled mumbles.

This is Alzheimer’s in the late stages. Not the soft-focus movie version where the old woman forgets your name but still delivers a line that sounds like poetry. This is the real thing: confusion, weakness, sadness—layered over with flickers of awareness that something is wrong but no ability to grasp what.

She doesn’t understand the context of her own life anymore. Why she’s in the facility. Why she can’t go home. Why she isn’t surrounded by familiar faces every moment of the day. And so every time I leave, I see it—the pain in her eyes. She doesn’t know why I’m going. She doesn’t understand that I’ll be back, or that I have to work, or that I’m managing her care behind the scenes. She only knows that I came, and now I’m walking away.

That’s the part nobody prepares you for. Telling your mother something she doesn’t want to hear—“No, you can’t come with me,” “No, you can’t go home”—and watching it land as pure betrayal. Because in her world, there’s no context. No explanation. Just the sharp sting of rejection from her own son. And then you have to turn and leave, carrying that look in her eyes with you, knowing she’ll sit in it until the next moment of confusion wipes it away.

My father—he’s a psychiatrist—likes to draw neat lines between delusion and hallucination, forgetting and imagining. But sitting across from my mother, none of that matters. You can’t categorize the look in her eyes when she asks for something simple, something impossible, and you have to deny her. You just take it, like a knife to the gut, and move on.

We put her in Atria. Big mistake. Or maybe there are no good choices. They pushed Risperidone like candy, a drug my dad compared to “hitting a flea with a sledgehammer.” They slapped on one-to-one care without asking and billed us for it. My sister fought back, filing grievances, parsing contracts, calling them out on their bullshit. But deep down we knew the truth: the system is built to win. The contracts are airtight. You can rage against them, but it doesn’t change the game.

Hospice seemed like an option, but hospice is just medication and comfort—what the facility was supposed to be doing already. They even denied her once. “Not ready.” As if there’s a scoreboard somewhere and my mother hasn’t earned her place in the final chapter yet.

Doctors keep circling with their tests. MRIs, specialists, recommendations that read like shopping lists. Why? There’s no cure. Dragging her through that feels like cruelty disguised as professionalism. She doesn’t need more machines, she needs peace.

So we take her out when we can. Drives, short walks, a chance to see something other than beige hallways. But even those moments are weighted with the same unspoken heartbreak. Because when the outing ends, when we have to bring her back, I see it again—that look. The pain. The question she doesn’t know how to ask: “Why are you leaving me here?” And there’s never a good answer.

Money isn’t the problem. I can cover the bills, the care, the whatever. What money can’t cover is that moment at the end of a visit when I stand up, say goodbye, and watch her face collapse into confusion and hurt. Alzheimer’s is not just a thief of memory—it’s a thief of understanding. She doesn’t know why I’m leaving, only that I am.

That’s the cruelest part. She isn’t gone, not yet. She’s still here enough to feel the loss, to feel the hurt, but not here enough to understand why. And I have to walk away from that, over and over again.

There’s no lesson here, no silver lining, no tidy philosophy to wrap this in. Just the grinding reality of watching your mother fade, one confused glance at a time.

This is dementia. This is Alzheimer’s. And it doesn’t just break the person who has it—it breaks everyone who loves them, one goodbye at a time.