Thank you Mom for being my mother and my best friend.

I would like to introduce you to my mom. She's 92 years old with severe dementia and lives in a nursing home.

Her name is Mary and she has 5 children. Three girls and 2 boys. Her youngest son, David has Downs Syndrome. All her life my mother devoted her whole existence to her family. She always wanted to make sure we were fed, safe and happy. My mother and I became really close when I got married for the first time. All of my siblings had moved away with families of their own and I stayed in the same city as my mother, except for my youngest brother.

I consider my mother to be my very best friend. We could sit for hours and talk about anything. Shopping and eating out were every Saturday. I always wanted her to be very fashionable and pretty. My mother had a very hard life when she was young and then when she had David, that was not easy to raise a child like that in those days. So I always wanted to be there for her.

Needless to say, my mother was always there for me too. When I divorced with a small child. She helped me raise him. I could always depend on her for any thing I needed. Over the years we developed such a strong bond that now that she has dementia and cannot remember me half of the time, it is very hard for me to accept. I feel like, not only did I lose my mother to this disease, but also my best friend. I miss her tremendously.

So I would like to honor my mother for being the very best person she could be to me and my son. We love her and miss her.