Much has been made of the movie Still Alice staring Julianne Moore as a woman with early stage Alzheimer’s disease. She received an Academy Award for her performance so, being a huge movie goer,  I have been chomping at the bit to watch it.

Strangely whenever I had the opportunity to see it, I chose to pass on it for something lighter, typically a comedy. I found that strange because I knew so much about the movie would resonate with me, considering my current living situation with Mom. Intuitively I knew it was going to be an extension of what I witness with my Mother, so I guess I was always too tapped out emotionally to give it an audience.

Towards the end of my last week away from Mom I decided it was a good time to finally get on Netflix and watch the movie. As expected, I was in tears about a third of the way through the film and they did not stop flowing until the credits began to roll. It was such a touching film and I felt it did justice to so many experiences a family shares with a loved one whose memory is disappearing.

I was particularly touched by the scene where the parents gather their adult children for a family meeting to break the news that their Mother has Alzheimer’s. It was a heartbreaking scene but such a generous gift to bring the children into the process and keep them informed on the aspects of the disease and ramifications they will all have to face.

Afterwards I remember thinking back to that scene and wondering why my parents didn’t do that for us. Especially since my Dad was a doctor, we were an open and loving family with better than average communication skills and we were all aware for years that Mom’s memory was starting to fail. What the hell?

The truth is, like the character in the movie, my Mothers had a genius intellect and so she was able to compensate for and mask the memory lapses for years. This was problematic for our family because we knew something wasn’t right but Mom downplayed it and managed for a very long time before alarm set in for us.

This insidious progression took away our opportunity for the “Aha” moment the family shared in the movie. Mom was in denial and we tip toed around trying not to insult her intelligence, embarrass her or give the memory lapses more energy than Mom was willing to allow. She needed to believe that it was a natural progression of the aging process and that everyone her age had memory problems. So we let her.

This is for me a profound regret. I wish I had been able to get through to her in the early years, before she was unable to believe she was losing her memory.  I wish we could have discussed her symptoms and courses of action she could take to help her odds, if any. I wish I could have found a way for Mom to not be so afraid.

At the very least I wish we had insisted on her facing her condition so we could have memorialized all that was in her mind, all the memories that would be lost. Memories like how she felt on her wedding day, what was the best day of her life, how old was she when she had her first beer or what was her favorite thing about being a Mother.  These and thousands more memories like them, all lost to us now….regretfully.