“A Virus Killed My Mom. It Took 30 Years. Nobody Knew What Was Wrong.”

CONTENT WARNING: This article is a brief memoir, and it’s grim. I found it worth reading, so I wanted to call your attention to it, but it’s tough.

Jessica Wildfire writes at OK Doomer:

It started sometime around my fourteenth birthday.

My mom began acting stranger than usual. She said things that didn’t make sense. She didn’t seem to understand what year it was. She talked about things that happened decades ago as if they’d happened yesterday. She remembered other things that had never happened at all. She said she’d lived in Paris.

My dad got frustrated and went to bed early.

He asked me to keep an eye on her and my brother, who was seven or eight at the time. “See if you can get her to talk sense.”

I tried.

Somehow I took it as a personal mission to lead my mom out of her fog. I listened. I tried to see if she was playing some kind of game with us. Maybe she was acting confused on purpose. Maybe she was angry about something and wanted me to figure it out. I stayed up with her until two or three. Then I crashed.

The next morning, she was still up.

She hadn’t slept.

She’d spent all night smoking cigarettes and drinking black coffee, sitting in pretty much the same place, barely responsive.

That went on for a couple of days, into the weekend. My dad made sarcastic remarks. Then he started giving her commands. He told her to stop acting weird. He told her to go outside and get some fresh air.

He made threats.

Finally, I convinced him to take her to the hospital. He treated it like a punishment, and an inconvenience. He acted like he was calling her bluff, that faced with a night in the ER, she’d admit it was all an act.

I remember walking my mom into the emergency room on a Friday night. She moved like she was underwater. It just seemed to make my dad even angrier. He walked so far ahead of us that I lost sight of him.

He acted embarrassed.

We spent all night there, waiting for  . . .

Continue reading. The mystery is explained, but the damage has been done.