(This post is copied over from my old blog at rivkahs.com)

I started this post with the intention of doing a year in review, but found I had so much to write about my late aunt that I changed the title and it is now a tribute to her instead. I think this post has actually been brewing for a while, I needed to get this out of my system.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote (I’ll write more about the year in general later) –
The most heartfelt event of my life this year was the death of my aunt in April. She was a wonderful woman with a kind, open heart. She helped and supported me at a time in my life when I really needed it, during the first years of my daughters life when I was a young single parent with no other female relatives within a short distance. She enabled me to cling on to a life apart from nappies and baby sick during the first few years of my twenties. Without her help, I’d never have gone to university. But more than that, she was a friend and companion during some very lonely times as well.

She didn’t deserve the ending she was given. It began when we (the family) started to notice she’d sometimes behave a little oddly. Things like telling my then toddler to turn on the hot tap when washing her hands, general forgetfullness, odd conversations. I really knew something was definately wrong when she called me one day in a distraught state. She’d been due to visit that day and she was late. When she told me that she’d just gotten off the bus around the corner from our house and was lost, she couldn’t remember the way, alarm bells began to ring. She’d been making that same journey for many years. In the end I had to go meet her at the phone box and walk her round to our house.

A year or so later she was finally diagnosed with alzheimers. She was 47(ish, I forget). Although we all pretty much knew by this time that something serious was wrong, it was still quite a shock. It’s something you expect your 80 year old relatives to have, not your middle aged aunt.

Many events occurred between then and the day she died. It was a slow and agonising decline, so painful and heartbreaking to watch, especially on the odd occasion you saw in her eyes that she knew something was wrong but didn’t know what. A look of sheer panic clouded her face on those moments, and all you could do was try to reassure her. My aunt had no children of her own (though she dearly wanted to, her only child was stillborn). It may sound a cruel thing to say, but it makes you feel glad that she didn’t have children, because it would have been such an agonising experience for them.

The last few years of her life she spent in a nursing home. I visited when I could, but now that I lived a few hundred miles away it wasn’t possible to go very often. Each time I went to see her the visible decline was shocking. The last few days I spent at her bedside in the agonising wait for death were the worst.

When I looked at her, I didn’t see my middle aged aunt who had looked after my daughter, who I used to go to see at lunchtimes when she worked around the corner from my workplace, or the woman I’d had many amusing (and sometimes frustrating) chats with over a drink in a pub. Instead I saw a frail, delicate, skeletal old lady.

She’d long ago lost the ability to walk, talk, feed herself. And it had been even longer since she’d recognised anybody. But now it was a massive effort for her to even breathe. The skin around her face was so tight it looked like somebody had stretched coloured cling film across her bones. Her hands so skeletal that you were frightened to hold them in case you snapped something. Alzheimers is a cruelty I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, and I hope that nobody reading this ever has to watch a loved one being slowly eaten by this disease.

When she took her final breath my mother and I were both there holding her hand and smoothing her brow, trying to comfort her as best we could. I’ll always be thankful that I was granted the ability to do that, to be there for her. During those last days of her life lots of family members had come to visit, I’d like to think that even if it was just for a fleeting moment, she knew we were there.

The end of her struggle was a relief. None of us knew how she’d clung on as long as she had. With no food for a number of weeks, nothing to drink for around 7 days, and with the drugs they were giving her, by rights she should have died days before she did. At the time I said to my mother with a knowing grin ‘it’s her stubborn streak’. And it was, it must have been. Sheer willpower was the only thing that was keeping her alive, but seeing the pain that struggle was causing her was awful. We were all thankful for her sake when she passed over.

I will never forget my aunt, she was a very special person to me. She was only 54 when she died.

Barb, you may be gone but you’re certainly not forgotten. Not by any of us.