I can't seem to shake the blues I've been carrying around the last few days. Maybe it's the grey, chilly weather (I even put on socks this morning), but more likely it's a feeling of failure and defeat. I'm finding it difficult to keep my sense of humor.

Throughout the last 2 1/2 months I've been trying to see this situation from Leola's perspective, but I just can't. I can't fathom what it would be like to lose so much memory and not be able to think straight. When I was 20 years old, I was hospitalized for severe depression and was given electric-shock therapy. I lost some memory after those treatments, which was both frustrating and frightening, but most of it came back eventually. I still have trouble remembering the people from high school my friends Mary and Nancy talk about, but it has been 40 years since I graduated from high school and I really don't care. Leola's loss of memory is vast and it includes language loss. Sometimes I see a blank look on her face when I talk to her, as though she's watching me on TV. Outward signs of frustration are obvious when she has difficulty explaining something and she will give up and say, "I guess I just don't have any brains anymore!" How horrible that must be.