The
Impact onFamily
" The hardest part of Alzheimer ' s was telling my mom she had it ."
Family Keepsakes : Kathleen and Anthony Dougherty in the late 1960s shortly after they were married . ( Below ): Their son , author and essayist Conor Dougherty ' 99 .
IT ’ S 2010 and I ’ m a 33-year-old man standing below an enormous blue whale at New York ’ s Natural History Museum , staring at its fiberglass fins while my mom is yelling at me .
She ’ s upset because I told her doctor I thought she had Alzheimer ’ s . I ’ m sad because you didn ’ t need a doctor to know she did . This is obviously not my favorite memory , but I am a little proud of it . Because that was the first day , after a lifetime of being the baby of the family — always getting more attention and freedom and Christmas presents — that I felt like I had stepped up . My dad and sister knew about mom ’ s Alzheimer ’ s long before I ever did , but I was the one who told the doctor . And now , I was taking one for the team .
Being the baby has advantages , but in general you are always a step behind . You are the last one to leave the kids ’ table and the last to get jokes at the adult one . So it makes sense that I was the last one to acknowledge when mom started losing her memory . But when the signs were undeniable and finally I got the courage to Google the word Alzheimer ’ s , it felt like I was giving her the disease , not researching it . I read Alzheimer ’ s has no cure . I read the drugs that slow it are not very good .
There was a brief moment of hope when I read that memory loss is also a symptom of depression . Maybe she just hates being retired ! I thought . I called my sister and she agreed : Wouldn ’ t it be great if mom was just depressed ?
But before we could figure any of this out my mom had to see a doctor — and she was having none of that . My dad asked her to get some memory tests and she refused . He even offered to do them with her . No dice .
32 TRITON | SPRING 2022