They Don't Know

I began my career in the medical profession as a Nurse's Aid in a Nursing Home. It is there that I learned to care. It is there that I saw dementia for the first time, every face of it in all its humor, its sadness, its beginning and its end. It is there that I helped the families of these victims of this disease. I helped them see that there loved one was safe with me, with us. That we cared. I loved that job.

Tonight my mother is under the care of the people in that same Nursing Home. Someone will take her into the bathroom and undress her, wash her and help her into her nightgown then walk her to bed, not her bed, but the bed assigned to her. The bed where my sister and I left her this afternoon. The bed from which she glared at me and said, "You tricked me. I want to go home."

All those years ago when I told those families that it was okay, we'd take good care of their loved one I couldn't possibly know that it wasn't true. Not for them. I know that now because now I know that no one will take care of my mother the way I want to. No one will love her the way my sister and I love her. They won't because the can't, they don't know what we've lost. They don't know the pain of this day.