I lost my Father's Father to this same disease just last March. And they say Cancer is a horrible disease, its not, you can battle cancer, but there is no treatment or cure for Alzheimers

Plus, with cancer the person suffering is still there. But with Alzheimer's it's like they are disappearing over time and becoming an empty shell of who they once were.

Exactly, with Alzheimers, what happens is the brain is slowly forgetting how to tell the rest of the body what to do, memories are forgotten, names, faces, places, dates, then eventually the brain forgets how you feed yourself, bath, shower, use the rest, move, and eventually breath, and finally it forgets to tell the heart to keep beating. It is by far the worst way to go in life, I miss my granfather, but at least I saw him before he started to forget everyone.

I lost my grandmother to this horrible condition , I was to young to understand much of it at the time but I think it hurt my grandfather more than anyone. My Grandmother was a lady in the old time sense of the word, with a dignity and grace that isn't seen today, nobody would even say poop around her for fear of offending her, by the end she was swearing so much it made my army grandfather blush. We had to leave her when my family moved, and it broke my grandfather in ways I couldn't understand, because when he went to say goodbye (him being to infirm to live alone anymore and had to come with us) she didn't know him and didn't care. At her funeral he didn't cry because the lady he loved so much had died years ago according to him. My mother now lives in fear of this horrible fate and every time her memory fails even a little my father and I have to deal with a spike of fear in our bones. She's reaching the age when it began to take grandma, and unless you have lived this you don't know how much it can frighten you to have to look in your mother's eyes and fear hearing "who are you?"