From the time Mitzi and I started hanging out together in 2016, I would ask her questions about her favorite memories because my job was to be her Memory Keeper. Without fail, when talking about her family, she would always talk about cherishing the times when she, Gary, and their kids would do Disney cruises. She loved getting away from the world; just their family, and sharing time together.I’m not going to lie, arranging your life to be a caregiver for someone who has Alzheimer’s can present some unique challenges. I had young boys (6 and 10) when I first started doing this, and we would often be a foursome. My boys and my husband truly made this whole scenario work and were so very generous in sharing me because they understood what Alzheimer’s required. This is to take nothing away from the time, energy, and emotional output required by her own family when caregiving for this disease. I did that when my grandmother lived with us for 4 years, so I had a unique and personal understanding in many ways of what was required of them when I wasn’t with her. To say this whole scenario was a very unique one is an understatement. Mitzi, as she would say, sort of “grafted” into our family, and in many ways, we were generously invited to “graft” into hers. Early on, I kind of became Mitzi’s “person.” And I was blessed to get to spend at least an average of 40 hours a week with her for much of her last 3 years of life. Up until early last Spring, she always had a keen awareness and appreciation of what it required of me, my family, and my friends, to make this work. She was always so, so very thankful; no matter how many times I would tell her that I knew that this was my special assignment and it was my joy to get to be her sidekick. A week after Mitzi’s beautiful celebration of life service, Gary said he wanted to come over and bring something by. He came in and put a gift on the coffee table and we opened it.Inside was a Disney Cruise Lines bag and an envelope with 3 different destination options for a 7 night family cruise. I knew as soon as I saw the bag what it was and why Gary was bringing this to us and I truly lost it. To be fair, he was pretty teary as well. He said Mitzi would have wanted to give our family that time together and those memories. And I knew without a doubt that she so would have.This afternoon, our family boarded the Disney Fantasy, for the Star Wars cruise headed to the US Virgin Islands and the Bahamas for a week of memories courtesy of Gary and Mitzi. We brought her favorite water bottle and my favorite purple shirt with the red cardinal on it. I haven’t made it through a whole hour yet without tearing up at some point, just knowing how happy it would have made her heart to know Gary made this gift of time possible.It was impossible to express to Gary yesterday our gratitude for this experience…it is one we could only have dreamed about doing. But moreover, when I hugged him in the driveway, as the beautiful full moon Mitzi would have loved rose in the sky above their home, I knew she was smiling down from her front row seat watching the legacy of how her story continues to unfold…????
