The end has come.

I joined this group in 2021 when my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. At that time, I was moving her to Assisted Living and she was still active, verbal, and VERY narcissistic, as she had been my whole life. In fact, I had been estranged from her for 15 years, only re-establishing contact in 2019. When we reconnected, she was completely alone and it was clear there was something terribly wrong. We struggled through for two years before we got a psych/neuro workup and she was diagnosed with ALZ and NPD. When I read the report and he casually mentioned that her narcissism had made it very difficult to evaluate her cognitive ability, everything fell into place. I went back to him to clarify and he said she was a classic case of NPD. Wow.
Between her forgetfulness and her narcissism, she kept me hopping and I was stressed and frustrated - and I finally found this group. Knowing there was a whole army of people out here dealing with the same stuff I was managing saved my sanity. Affirming that my actions were appropriate for our situation helped tremendously and I quit approaching her punitively, but strategically - most days.
As the years have passed, her fiery personality faded away and she was scarcely able to communicate with me. It took her a LOT of effort to get a point through to me. Delusions, babbling, confusion, fear took over. And then they didn't. They went away too, and she slept a lot. A woman who ate every meal with gusto could hardly be persuaded to eat. An avid walker, Mom could no longer get herself out of bed - not that she didn't try. And then she quit trying. In the last few months, she fell silent and I rarely saw her eyes I did things and I realized they were things she would have scolded me mercilessly about, but she didn't even acknowledge them. My once angry, excitable, sometimes vindictive mother was gone, but her body lived on. She was silent.
She was on dementia hospice for nearly two years and I can't say enough good about what they did. They took care of her, even while she was in Memory Care, and they took care of me too. Eventually, they told me we were seeing her decline. I asked them to be 100% honest with me and they were. I told them it was important to me to be at her side when she passed and they tried to help me honor that desire. We had two false alarms - times when I believe she passed very close to death but somehow rallied back. I went to her side and sat with her, sang to her, read to her, told her stories. At the first close call, Hospice approached me and asked me if I wanted to take her off her maintenance meds. Somehow, this jarred me a little. We went through the med list and agreed that nothing there was making her more comfortable, so I directed them to take her off them. She had been on a memory med, two antidepression meds, and an anxiety med, among others. She went off the meds and perked back up for about two weeks, but it didn't last.They called me again on the 25th to say her vitals were really sinking. I dropped what I was doing (I was working on a board meeting scheduled for the next day - yikes!) and I went to her side. MC staff was in and out all day, hospice came and went, but I stayed by her side until 9 pm, when I went home, thinking we might be doing this for a few days and I needed to take care of myself. I woke up at 1:30 am and realized I had not received a call from MC, then went back to sleep. At 1:45, they called to tell me she was gone.
I can say that I regret being so impatient to get away from her once she quit recognizing me, but only a little bit. That's really hard, no doubt. I can't say I missed the narcissistic behavior, but I did miss - in those last months - her personality. The silence was unbearable. So it is, I'll probably stay around and lurk - but I want to say THANK YOU to this group for getting me through this dark time. I wish y'all the best a you too contend with this disease.