Family sadness

I am very sad and a bit scared right now. I just got off the phone with my mom and she was telling me about my grandma. My grandma has dementia, and is getting worse by the day. Right now she lives alone in a Seniors apartment. It seems that she is going to need to move to a nursing home sooner rather than later.

She is either taking her meds twice or not at all, she is walking in to other people's apartments and she can't remember that my Aunt Yvonne is dead (and my Aunt Yvonne died 35-40 years ago.)

This last week she was not at home and she came out of the bedroom she was staying in in hysterics, "Where's Jolene, I can't find Jolene, I lost her, I'm a horrible mother..."

This is bad for two reasons. The first is that Jolene is my sister and her granddaughter not her daughter. She has for a while now confused my sister's name with her daughter's name. And the second reason is that her daughter (my Aunt Yvonne) has been dead for a long time.

I think that in her confusion she knows that she lost Yvonne to death, but all she remembers is that she lost her and so is in panic, desperately searching for her daughter. My heart hurts at the thought of this.

My Grandma has ever been so independent and now the thought of having her live in a nursing home and taking her independence away is so hard.

Part of the reason this is so hard for me is that my other Grandma was dead in under a year after being moved to a nursing home, because she just gave up on life. She loved where she was living, but her children (my dad's siblings) decided that they couldn't keep paying for her to live where she was and so moved her to a nursing home. She felt discarded and unwanted. I believe in my heart that she decided to die so she wouldn't be a burden anymore.

Oh God, I don't want to lose my Grandma.