[This is an adaptation of an essay that my younger daughter, Kristen, wrote as part of her application for admission to University of Rochester. The application required an essay in first person as a middle-age physician about what she had learned during her years of practice. Whether Kristen realized it or not, the person she described as her patient was Kristen’s grandmother. I have rewritten Kristen’s essay in first person as myself describing what I learned from my mother.]

    Her name was Ruth. She was known in her youth as “Dutch.” She was known to her husband as “Ruthie.” She was “mom” to me.

    She spent ten of the last eighteen years of her life caring for my father who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. He was lost without her. He mimicked her every move even though he couldn’t recall her name. She had to care for him as she had once cared for her infant sons. Only Ruth was no longer the age of a young parent. The stress resulted in physical problems complicated by bouts with depression.

  His memories were gone for the latter years of his life. Ruth’s only memories were of the pain of the present. The debilitation of someone she once loved. Someone who once loved her in return . . . but then didn’t know who she was.

    She couldn’t leave him, and yet in staying with him she couldn’t have a life of her own. His love for her became forgotten. Her love for him changed to resentment.

    Eventualy he died, and she began to live again.

    And just as in the song The Way We Were by Alan and Marilyn Bergman -

Memories, like colors of my mind,
Misty water color memories,
Of the way we were.

she began to remember him the way he was - before the Alzheimer’s. She remembered his tenderness as a husband, his nurturing as a father. She recalled the

Scattered pictures of the smiles we left behind.
Smiles we gave to one another
For the way we were.

    I have learned from Ruth. From her experience, I can counsel others as well as myself that

What’s too painful to remember,
We simply choose to forget.

        She began to remember

A kind of September when life was slow

And all so mellow

    Like the song, she followed. And her life became mellow.

    Aging is difficult. But it is what we agreed to endure by accepting life. Enduring it is easier knowing that

It is the laughter we will remember,
And we will remember the way we were . . .

    I have become a better person from my experience with my own mother. I have learned that life goes on despite the infirmities of age. What may be a bad experience today will be a more pleasant memory tomorrow.