I was a very young child when it was explained to me that my grandfather had Alzheimer's.

For many years he just sat in a chair and slept, only to get up to eat.
One time I came home from a carnival with an American flag and a pirate/jolly roger, skull & crossbones flag. Without a word he snatched the jolly roger flag from my hand and snapped the dowel in two.
Only a couple of weeks ago I was thinking about it, and how he may have felt threatened by the symbol of death. I dunno. It was scary at the time, but I was never hateful, just confused.
Sometimes we might find him standing in the basement in long-underwear, on a hot day, like the 4th of July.
Sometimes we might find that he had done something silly, like put an apple crate on top of the water sprinkler.

At the time, those weird behaviors were regarded with shock and fear by my family, which to some extent bred fear and repulsion in me.

Much of the time my Grandmother took care of Grandpa without assistance. My parents and I only came for a couple of weeks at a time, twice a year.

The accumulation of strangeness must have been overwhelming for my grandmother to deal with, and I don't mean to trivialize it at all, but in hindsight my grandfather's behaviors were really pretty harmless. The scariest thing about them was that they signified a regression, a departure, yes they pointed toward an end.

At some point my mom worked with my grandmother to find a nursing home for grandpa. It seemed like the best thing to do at the time.

I am still too young, and inexperienced to really say for sure that what they did wasn't the way to go. But, there is one single observation that I have made which sums up my contempt for the particular place they chose to take him: the day my grandfather was checked-in to the nursing home was the last day I ever saw him walk.

From that point on his muscles atrophied, and his body curled-up into a stiff ball. They had a catheter put in him, that was clearly very irritating to him. He eventually developed bed sores all over his body.

Then he died after he caught pneumonia, after several years of residency in the nursing home.

My grandma had even visited him twice a day, to feed him, but I don't think that the decision to put him in a nursing home adequately solved the problems, especially when all of the costs are involved, and that his loss of connection with the world exacerbated with the loss of stimulus: he was trapped, and just because he acted funky didn't mean he wasn't aware enough to lose contentment.

I think the experience was so traumatic, that when my grandmother became terminally ill, about 20 years later, my mom hired anywhere from 1-5 different care-takers for her, to attend her in her own home. Through that course of treatment, although it was a huge logistical scheduling problem, my grandmother was able to enjoy the dignity of dieing in her own home.

From my perspective, when I came to visit my grandmother on her death bead, she was still able to be happy. My grandmother was not religious, but she was scared of death, and she often entertained the thought, that she wished she could spend eternity with her mother. So what else would such a strong woman do, but die on her own mother's birthday, at the age of 101?