Talking about my mum and the struggles of our family has been simultaneously really difficult and yet, oddly comforting. Her disease isn’t something that I usually talk about because I don’t want people to feel sorry for my family or think differently about my mum, so being able to talk about it, even with a bunch of strangers, has been quite refreshing. I’ve been on a really sad journey that has defined my life in ways that most people would never understand, and talking about it has helped me work through some things that I never thought I’d be able to work through.
I’ve been told that my mum isn’t going to make it. She has six months at most until her brain disease finally kills her. When I say finally, I hope you don’t think that I want her to die. I mean it more in the way that we always knew this day would come and it feels simultaneously unreal and completely expected.
I don’t know what I looked like when the kind disability support worker told me the news, but I’m sure it wasn’t pretty. She probably watched my heart break in real time and hers was probably breaking too. She’s looked after my mum for over a decade now and really has become a part of our family. I know she loves my mum just as much as I do, as my dad does and as my brother does. This is the last thing any of us wanted, but we always knew it was going to happen.
Putting my mum into SDA housing close to the Adelaide CBD was the best thing we could’ve done. We gave mum a quality of life that we wouldn’t have been able to give her ourselves and even though these last ten years have been incredibly difficult for my mum and our family, I know they were the best they could’ve been.