I really like that picture - we all look happy, confident and good. Looking at Mom, it reminds me of what Phil and I were talking about the other day - how he could not ever remember Mom having people over to the house while he was growing up. Well, there were at least a few - priests mostly. I remember when I was young we used to have large celebrations with neighbors - often around religious holidays. There was a lot of socializing. Phil has heard about those times but missed out on them.

Over the years I guess there is a certain amount of natural progression to these things. Our children grow up and we begin to have less mandatory participation in things that require socializing. But somehow, somewhere along the way, Mom not only withdrew from socialing, but became morose in her aversion to it.

Looking at that picture, thinking about how she managed the complexities of raising a family of seven, always on the move, time after time adapting to new environments, at times all on her own, it makes recognizing her now all that more difficult.

It's hard to reconcile the determination with which she used to tackle life with the helpless withdrawl from life that we are seeing now. That's not to say that she has lost the determination. She has not lost the determination to be in control of her life. But that is no longer possible between her depression and her Alzheimer's. Therein lies the conflict - she is fluctuating back and forth between competency and incompetence. More and more often she is being overwhelmed by the demands of even the simplest demands of living - like remembering what outdated milk smells and tastes like.

Be it her depression, her long-standing guilt over her own mother's death, her separation from Dad, and the combination of all these and other factors, she continues to resist help and languishes in self-imposed isolation, devoid of the stimulation that would slow her regression.

I feel pretty good about Dad and the care that I have contributed to his relative well-being. I am sorry that he could not continue to live with Mom and in his own home. I feel that we made reasonable efforts to keep them together. I regret that they rejected all of the plans that we put forth that might have accomplished that. Dad has adapted better than Mom.

I don't have the same level of comfort with Mom. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I feel more affectionate towards Dad than I do Mom. I wonder why that is. Maybe it's just that she can be so difficult and unpleasant, where Dad is so rarely taxing.

I hope that I am a likeable old person.