After Mom's passing, I am driving myself nuts that I am getting Alzheimer's? Anyone relate!

i work for the public and that can amount to hundreds of people over a 15 - 20 yr period . i dont even try to remember names and the customers understand . its like " you fixed that chimney for me out on jordan rd " . then i remember the job , still dont care about the name . men who shave their faces all look the same to me and ill come closer to remembering a female customers behind as i would her name or face . then people tint their automobile windows and wave like your supposed to recognize them . i recognize them by their gender . it was either ff ( not freq flyer ) or hor who waved . so much easier than remembering names.

Lost my daughter June 8th, she was only 32. She battled brain cancer, skin cancer and finally, Leukemia. Yeah, I'm nuts. Her birthday, Oct 7, was a very bad day. I know the one year anniversary is usually a hellhole.
I saw how death affects a couple married 60 years. Grandma died and Grandpa withered up like a leaf and died in three months.
I saw my mother die when I was 10 and she was 37. My father was an angry man for the next 39 years, he felt cheated and abandoned.
Will you get over it? Maybe. Only if you can move forward. Only if you can cognitively redirect from the darkest moments to the brightest ones. Every time it creeps up, I remember birthdays, vacations, tooth fairies and refrigerator art.
You gotta do that to survive.

Sujean, I can really relate! I did not know that mourning could take on cognitive aspects, but I sure experienced that. For months after my husband's death I did things like try to pay for my groceries with my library card, fail to recognize a neighbor, and stand staring into space wondering what I had come into this building for. I needed a list to shop for two things. I had a hard time concentrating.

I have a depressive disorder and also a sleep disorder. I didn't go to anyone specifically to deal with the mourning, but during this period I was in touch with two psychiatrists, a psychologist, and a psychotherapist. All assured me that I was experiencing a somewhat unusual but perfectly normal form of mourning.

That was two years ago. I pay for items with my credit card and use my library card for books. I can sometimes remember as many as 3 items without a list! I'm back to my baseline, cognitively.

Stop worrying about dementia. It won't help, and it probably makes matters worse. Give yourself more time. The huge changes in our lives when caregiving ends take a lot of adjustment. It doesn't happen overnight.

This is how I think about memory loss.... our brain is like a room with a lot of filing cabinets, and once we get to middle age all those files drawers are filled with tons of information and there isn't any more room. When we try to think of a name [happens to me when I watch an old movie] our filing system isn't up to date, and it takes awhile to find that file with all the names in it :)

But I do understand how you feel... I have the same issue and neither of my parents have dementia or Alzheimer's and they are in their mid-90's.... it's just that we were thrown into a *job* where we got zero training, everything was trial and error, lot of frustration, and a ton, and I mean a really large ton of worry. All that worry caused the drawers of those file cabinets to stick and not open like they use to :P

My boss is 79 years old and I am 68, and we laugh that hopefully between the two of us there is one brain. We are always forgetting something, but nothing forgotten is earth shattering.