In anticipation of Saturday

Tomorrow is the day I pick up Maggy. Every Saturday I go to her house and start all over again. Maggy is 90 years old and has Alzheimer's. I've been care giving for her the last three weeks but it has already impacted my life greatly. I decided to create this blog so I could just get my feelings out, maybe contemplate life a little.

Maggy is surprisingly spry and takes care of most of her own needs. We do cook for her because she has a hard time remembering the steps and gets really frustrated with that. The question I can't help but ask is, why? If our souls choose their own life paths, why would she choose this? Her short term memory is at this point really only about thirty seconds. Sometimes she will surprise me and remember something from last week or something, but this is rare.

Last week when I went to pick her up I was wearing an orchid colored sundress. She kept going on about how she wanted one just like it although the style would not be becoming on a 90 year old woman. It was as though, in those few hours, she'd transformed into her former twenty-something self. She told me she needed to call her mother to let her know she'd be late for dinner, she even giggled like a young girl over my wedding album. So here's where I admit that I'm a young girl, only 26. Was she somehow relating to my identity because she couldn't remember her own?

And what is this thing we call an identity anyway? Who exactly are we if strip it all away? Take away the memories, take away the relationships, take away everything we've learned. We'd still exist, she still exists. This seems now as if this is the point, the reason her soul has chosen this path. I am. She is. We are still here if you take away everything. But who exactly?