Good Afternoon Everyone,

I invite you to log onto the home page and read my 2015 New Year's Blog. After reading the blog and my idea of what a "happy" new year would look like for me, I would like you to post here what you, as an Alzheimer Spouse, would consider a "happy" new year for you. Obviously, our idea of Happy New Year is different than those in the non-Alzheimer world. I would like us to share our version of Happy New Year with each other.

Thank you.

joang

Happy New Year for me would be to stop being so negative about the NH level of care. I do believe that is unrealistic so I will just be happy when I hear the birds singing and see the flowers blooming. Since DH has only been capable of walking and eating for 4 years I do not think about progression of ALZ. When it happens it happens. I will just be happy when I get to see my grandgirls and get invited out without having to beg someone to go with me. Happy New Year to All my friends at Joan's Place.

I want to say, and I know I am not alone here, that seeing Dado's name on the Memoriam list was so unreal, and just makes me cry again. Not in a bad way, it is just such a shock still . I love you Dado, forever and ever. Always I will never forget what you have done for me.

So I do like New Years, and am glad Christmas is over. Though I love the reason for it, and especially the part of family, it has never been good for me, and worse now. When I was a little girl my Dad would often bust up the house in drunken anger and we would have to call the cops, (his house burned down Christmas day when he was a child, we knew that ). Mom had 9 kids to comfort.

I have a wish list for the New Years, and for those of you still in caregiving, I hope you don't mind that I want to wish for you.

1. I wish and hope that you can stay healthy through this process.
2. I pray for comfort from any source, whether it be family, friends, new friends , strangers, counselors, or your faith.
3. I hope you can come to see the truth of this disease, because when it is over, you will look back, and see that it was worse than you thought, that it was TRUE, and that our mates could really not help it.
4. And I hope with every fiber of my heart, that if you lose your mate, you can hold on, just plough through those first few months, (the very hardest for me), and just HOLD ON with hope that there will be a brighter day.

I am always so touched by you that are still on this journey, and I worry about you.

For those of us that have lost our mates-

1.That WE hold on, and hope and believe in a brighter day.
2. That we take care of ourselves, eat well, exercise.
3. That we feel NO remorse or guilt and know that we are truly human beings just trying to do our best, and forgive ourselves when we fall short.
4. That we can take our vast experience and reach out to make others feel good, and reap the blessings we deserve.
5. And that we can somehow believe, that when the cutting pain of fresh loss eases a bit, that our mate is somehow seeing us, and feeling so lucky to have had that love and caring in their lives.

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU!!! YOU MEAN SO MUCH TO ME!!

Profile: EOAD in last months where she is 63, unaware of her surroundings, and has been in a NH for 3 years.

The main ways I am celebrating my own happy new year and the entrance to 2015:

1. I have reminded myself this is a long, destructive disease that has made our lives this way. Neither of us is this where she is not a 100 year old lady in a wheelchair and I am not normally tormented by grief and depression and anxiety attacks. I must never make the mistake that I am like this now and instead keep reminding myself that (in my case) I am doing almost all the suffering where my wife is unaware and the burden I feel now is a cumulation of a list of growing burdens over years - not just where I am now. It's Alzheimer's - not me.

2. I mark the new year turning because I need something I can rely on when so much of my normal is churning. I spend time honestly trying to understand where I am. I did no such thing when I was the active caregiver. After three years on my own in every way as though my wife had passed, I need some genuine feedback I can rely on. What's happening to me? I go out more, I have more fun, I have less days of trauma, I have more normal feeling days, I'm opening to some things, and so on. In 2014 the bad overall was less (for me) and the good overall was more. It's working. On with 2015.

3. I don't expect to magically solve how I feel. I know how tired I am of the actual, real, and hard burden we are all under and I've already proven to myself it's getting better overall, so when it hits and when it's painful I remind myself this part passes just as the highs do - and that until I get through what I have to get through and those swings tend to more normal ranges (everybody swings through highs and lows to some point), I need to help myself through those times even if that's watching the clock tick by and allowing myself to just sit.

4. I'm committing to continuing what I started last year which is to stop isolating myself because almost all people are useless/unable/hurtful around Alzheimer's and therefore selectively targeting the ones who happen to be around me is really punching myself in the face. You can be anybody from anywhere and when you get AD you're still in all probability going to be badly hurt by some around you. Since that is all cases (I'm sorry but) it has nothing to do with you or with them. It's a part of having Alzheimer's no matter what and no matter who. It's not forgiving - it's acceptance of reality. Alzheimer's isolates the spouse because almost everybody sucks around it and we always have no choice. In my world understanding that finally helped me to not create more destruction but instead accept that and so I opened some doors and felt their equally real compassion for me.

5. I celebrated new years at home alone and in fact posted right at midnight. I celebrated new years at my post. I didn't go to see Dianne where I stopped feeding her lunch instead of the person paid to feed her because it is too sad for me to watch these last things go. Alzheimer's has shredded normal meaning into confetti where I don't mind if she passes peacfully and we haven't talked at all in over four years. I can't describe how lonely and empty I feel. Yet I have learned who it is I want to be in a fox hole with. Me. And I am.

Yes, but it's a tradition and it's something people feel they have to say.

I agree that there is nothing happy about hoping that your spouse will die (even if peacefully) or hoping that their disease will quickly advance to the point they are unaware of what is going on. Anyhow, it doesn't matter whether we hope for those things or not, since we have no control over how fast our spouses' diseases will progress or when and how they will die. So I choose not to take my mind down that grim road. As I see it, I'm just along for the ride.

There are some things we do have control over. I only have one wish in that category - that I can keep myself in good enough mental and physical shape to hang on for the duration and do whatever needs to be done to help my husband. But that is certainly not a wish for a "happy" new year.

After eight years of dementia, I agree with Joan. I pray it is over soon. Not for my sake, for his. Although, in a way it is for my sake too because I can't stand to watch him go through these later stages any longer. I see some of the other residents in the home who look much worse than he does, and I don't want him to go through what they're going through. I must excite him when I visit. I visit and he wants to leave. When I'm not there he's cooperative. My daughter saw him one hour after I left and entered the floor listening to him screaming at the top of his lungs. She had to calm him down, even though he didn't even know her. I didn't visit today.

A Happy New Year for me would be for my DH to pass peacefully. He fell and broke his hip just before Christmas and is now on Hospice. This journey has been since 2006 and like all who have walked this path I just want it to end. Nothing could bring more happiness then to know he is finally released from this horrific disease. We have shared 59 years of marriage and to want more would only be selfish of me. He has been in memory care now for 16 months and still knows me and I'm grateful for that. He has a DNR but when fall happened I had to allow surgery to relieve his pain. He is now pain free and on ICC (intensive comfort care).

This is my first post and I must tell you that your comments fill my heart knowing that I am not alone on this journey. My husband, Chuck, is in the moderately severe stage. This holiday season was so difficult as I put the x-mas decorations around the house, something we have always had such joy in doing he sat and watched not participating.

And then came New Years. No understanding of the holiday and to make it worse for me, it is my birthday. He doesn't know that and I feel alone.

This is a journey I don't feel anyone deserves and like Joan. I want him to be a peace not feeling ashamed because he can't find the right words or finding it difficult to dress or fix a meal.

Bless all of you.

darlenegail,

Please look on the last page of the Welcome New Members thread for a welcome from me. Anyone who wishes to welcome or answer darlenegail, please do so in the Welcome New Members thread, so it does not get lost in this thread. Thank you.

joang