Sometimes during those last few months, Joann slips into her bedroom and begins to twirl.
She no longer recognizes her home or her family. But she remakes her 89-year-old body into a memory of the girl she’d been. She dances to music only she can hear.
Alzheimer’s Dance
Joann Ray Blake
2/24/1933 - 2/1/2022
Those are the good times. On bad days, Joann speaks impatiently to a vase as if it were a hard-of-hearing train agent, demanding a ticket to her childhood home in Kansas City, Missouri. Worse days are crisscrossed with tears, agitated pacing, and the frustration of not recognizing the Mission, Texas property where she lived for decades.
When we visit on a summer morning in 2021, a thin beam of morning light begs its way inside through a small window in her double-wide trailer as her daughter Sissy helps her mother rise, gripping Joann’s hands as Alzheimer’s grips her mind. Alone together, they face the disease’s final stages.
She was always happy to talk to me until she got dementia and then you could hear her frustration.”
When we return in December 2023, Sissy and her son David are cleaning out the house. Memories push from every corner.
Here is a tablecloth embroidered by a great aunt. There is an arithmetic book that Joann’s grandfather used to teach Joann how to add. Against that wall is the piano Joann learned to play as a girl, and her daughter practiced on two decades later. “Once, this was the centerpiece of my mother’s home,” Sissy recalls.
Sissy—a nickname from childhood that stuck—is intimately acquainted with Alzheimer’s. Her father, Dale Blake, died of it in 2004. Her mother, Joann Ray Blake, passed in February 2022, six months after our first visit and a few days shy of her 90th birthday. Sissy was the only one there.
Sissy was a nurse for over 30 years, retiring in 2023 from an assisted living facility in Rio Grande City where many patients suffer from Alzheimer’s. She points to two factors she believes are overlooked when considering the disease: stress, and years of poor nutrition.
The death of family members – first Sissy’s brother and then her youngest daughter – triggered a decline for both her parents, she says. Eating habits in this part of Texas often trigger a myriad of problems, including obesity and diabetes, says Sissy, whose own favorite meal growing up was a slice of white bread topped with navy beans and onions.
Before Joann started showing signs of forgetfulness and losing her hearing about 2016, Sissy says her mother was her “gossip buddy.” Now, sitting on the floor in her mother’s bedroom, Sissy dips into a box of photos, bringing frozen moments into sharp focus.
Day’s end. A horse that lives on Sissy’s 1,600-acre Roma ranch is reflected in a car mirror.
Soap dishes cradling rocks could be found throughout Joann’s house. Her husband collected rocks, and the dishes were heirlooms from his family. It was Joann’s eye that merged these two together.
