I don’t agree with people having the right to choose when they end their life. My mother went through the slow, degenerative disease of dementia, spending the last ten years of her life at two different facilities. A few times I had someone ask me – didn’t I wish that the right to die idea was legal, especially since she had no idea where or who she was. And my answer was always no, that’s not a choice that we should even have. Who am I to decide to short-circuit my mother’s affect or blessing on someone else’s life. Was it easy to watch her slowly disappear before my eyes, and turn into someone that was hardly recognizable as my mother, no it wasn’t. Did I learn a lot of things from going through ten years (or more) of dementia with my mother? Yes I did. I learned how to be compassionate and loving to someone even though there is going to be nothing for you in return. I learned that things don’t always work out the way you expected them to, but you learn to deal with it and carry on. I had to let go of a lot of childhood grudges and just show my mother unconditional love for the moment she was in. She loved to play solitaire and do word search puzzle books. When she was no longer capable of doing either of these things, I did them for her. I would sit across the table from her and play solitaire over and over, while she watched. Sometimes she would reach her hand out and point at a card that I forgot to move and we would laugh. I would sit right next to her with a word search book and she would be content just watching me circling the words.  I learned to count my blessings for sure, and one thing I was especially thankful for in regards to her disease was that she was mellow and easygoing for the most part. She would automatically say No! when anyone asked her a question, but she did that before the disease started attacking her brain!! I was extremely thankful that there were competent people who helped to take care of her. It made things much easier for me and made a better quality of life for my mother.

We are all in this world for a reason. Sometimes it’s easy to see someone suffering and think they should be put out of their misery. But many times, that person ends up teaching someone in their world something that they needed to learn. Maybe my mother taught someone at her nursing home to have more compassion, maybe she was the one who was there just to brighten someone’s day because she smiled and said thank you for something they did for her. There is no way to know why she was allowed to suffer for so many years with this horrible disease, but it happened, and we dealt with it, and made the best of it, because really that’s all you can do.

It’s so easy to see disabled children or handicapped adults and think what’s the point of their life. . . but their life does have a point, and part of that point might be to show us, while we are sitting there thinking they don’t matter, that there is something wrong with the way we are thinking – and that we should value their life, as limited as it might be, and we should be willing to learn from them and be compassionate towards them. We might be surprised what we find out, about them and about ourselves.