Apathy and Alzheimers

I used to feel such urgency about my mother in the years after Dad died. I had a nurturing dutiful way toward her for 15 years. When she first moved into the house beside ours, I imagined a warm closeness between us in these later years of her life. I pictured frequent visits, shared coffee, spontaneous conversations, a kind of repaired tenderness that often seems possible when parents age and children finally soften toward one another.

Instead, something far more complicated happened.

In the months since she moved beside me, I have gained weight, grown more depressed, and developed a kind of alarming apathy toward her that I can barely admit out loud. I spend an unreasonable amount of time quietly inventing reasons not to walk next door and check on her. She does not explicitly demand my attention. In fact, she is introverted enough that she rarely asks for much at all. But there is an invisible expectation suspended between us now, one that hums constantly in the background of my days.

I feel I should want to spend time with her.

The troubling truth is that often I do not.

That realization fills me with guilt because I know how cruel it sounds. She is elderly. She is declining. She is still my mother. And yet something inside me has gone emotionally numb in response to her diagnosis and the growing signs of dementia slowly rearranging her personality.

Home itself has become difficult in ways that compound everything else.

My husband is carrying burdens of his own and disappears into endless hours of television to avoid thinking about them. My son is almost never home anymore, and when he is, his humor has sharpened into the kind of constant sarcasm that leaves me feeling irritated and strangely lonely. The puppies are chaotic and needy. Half our house still bears the scars of last fall's flood, with unfinished repairs, exposed walls, and the exhausting visual reminder of things left undone.

Years ago, I never would have tolerated living this way. But I have slowly come up against a painful reality: you cannot singlehandedly force another person to act simply because they repeatedly promise they will. Eventually I stopped waiting and took on more work myself so I could hire people to repair what wasn't being repaired.

Work, unfortunately, offers little emotional refuge either.

My boss is genuinely kindhearted but chronically overwhelmed and disorganized, which means responsibilities spill outward onto everyone else at all hours. I originally accepted the position partly because I longed to escape my damaged house and be physically around other people again. After years of isolation and remote work during COVID, I craved ordinary human energy. Casual conversations. Shared spaces. The simple psychological lift of not sitting alone all day inside my own thoughts.

But despite promises of in-office collaboration, we remain mostly remote. The one coworker I interact with regularly is lazy, hostile, and eager to shift blame whenever things go wrong. Every environment in my life seems to contain some version of exhaustion, avoidance, or disappointment.

And then there is my mother.

Her official diagnosis is "cognitive decline of unknown origin," though everyone quietly understands what direction this is heading. The changes arrive in layers: confusion, repetition, misplaced objects, defensiveness, subtle manipulations, strange little deceptions that feel less malicious than childlike. Every week something new disappears from her personality while other difficult traits become amplified.

What frightens me most is not simply her decline, but my own emotional response to it.

I do not feel saintly or patient or endlessly compassionate. I feel tired. Irritated. Withdrawn. Sometimes almost resentful.

And underneath that is fear.

Because I have seen this disease before.

My grandfather had Alzheimer's when I was a child, and he lived with us during the final years of his decline. Some of my memories of that period still feel strangely vivid and frightening. I remember him chasing me through the downstairs of our home one day, convinced I was an intruder trying to steal from him. I remember my mother trying to coax him into bathing while he pretended, like a stubborn child, splashing water briefly before draining the tub moments later. I remember hearing her mutter under her breath that the stress was killing her.

At the time, I pitied her.

Now, decades later, I find myself standing in almost the exact same emotional terrain.

My mother hides things and lies about them in ways she believes are convincing. She becomes defensive when confused. Sometimes I catch flashes of the exhausting road ahead and immediately feel myself recoil from it.

That recoil is the part I am most ashamed of.

I keep wanting to become the version of myself this situation seems to require: endlessly patient, endlessly loving, endlessly available. Instead I often feel emotionally flattened by the sheer accumulation of everything happening at once — middle age, menopause, caregiving, financial stress, unfinished homes, remote work isolation, a nearly grown son pulling away, a marriage strained by exhaustion, and very little meaningful support holding any of it up.

Maybe apathy is not always cruelty.

Maybe sometimes it is emotional overload finally reaching capacity.

Lately I have been trying to stop condemning myself so harshly for not handling all of this gracefully. I am beginning to understand that surviving difficult seasons is sometimes less about dramatic transformation and more about stabilizing the small things still within your control.

For me, right now, that begins with my health.

I cannot control dementia. I cannot fully control my husband, my son, my coworkers, or the unfinished state of my home. But I can begin caring for myself more honestly instead of numbing myself with food and exhaustion. I can try to nourish my body instead of punishing it. I can move more gently through my days. I can take walks. Stretch. Sleep better. Rebuild small routines that make me feel slightly more anchored inside my own life.

Perhaps hope returns quietly that way — not all at once, but through small acts of care repeated consistently enough that you begin to recognize yourself again.