A Reflection To Remember

P.R. “Randy” Cooney

Publisher, Arizona Journal of Real Estate & Business

Over this past holiday season one of our students, Sandy Allen, shared how she had to travel back east with her sister to move her Mom into an assisted living home. Sandy expressed that it was a challenging and often emotional time – especially because her Mom is suffering from Alzheimers disease. Sandy’s story about an aging parent, as well as many others from students over the years, inspired me to write the following reflection. Sandy and her sister appreciated it so very much, I wanted to share this reflection with our readers who may be encountering a similar challenge of caring for a loved one with short-term or long-term memory loss.

REALLY STILL HERE – JUST NOT AS NEAR

As you talk with me now,
you may find yourself asking why and how?
Just know that I am not as gone as it may appear.
I just need to occasionally, yet involuntarily, disappear.
Now that you may be pondering
about my occasional wondering,
allow me a few minutes of your attention
to share my personal challenges of retention.

I often reside deep in the corridors of my mind,
undertaking a search of lost memories, I hope to find.
The once easy to retrieve, as in names, faces, and places
have now become multiple cupboards of empty spaces.
Through no one’s apparent fault,
one by one the keys are vanishing to my memory vault.
Oh dear Lord help me
to locate those keys – If you please
so I can once again be all of me.
I pray not to become simply a memory
of who I use to be,
especially to those so dear to me.

And for those few of you now standing by my side,
It is my time to confide
that deep within my own inside
I too, wish I could again be
all that made you and I into a we.
However, if that is not again meant to be
know on this day
that in some non-comprehensible way
we shall be always bound together
into one another’s forever.

I simply express and embrace gratitude this day
for all those lost and yet cherish memories,
that now bind us into each other’s eternities.

As we both acknowledge that time has taken much of myself away
Thank you for sharing some of you with what remains of me today,
for I’m really still here — just not as near.

Inspired by a conversation with a Realtor, Sandy Allen, regarding her Mom, Betty Hohn, suffering from Alzheimers.