Oct 26, 2014 3 min read

The computer magazines were a sign that something was wrong.

Bracken Burns was going over expenses with his mother, Jane Burns, at her home sometime in the early 1990s when he asked about $60 monthly payments she had been talked into making by some silver-tongued telephone solicitor. Turns out his mother had agreed to subscribe to a periodical about computers, even though she had not one iota of interest in the subject.

“My mother couldn’t pick out a computer from a line of blenders,” Burns recalled recently. The former Washington County commissioner was an up-close witness to his mother’s relatively quick deterioration from what he presumes was Alzheimer’s disease, though a precise determination was never made.

The first indications that his mother’s temperament and cognitive skills were changing for the worst came in 1989, shortly after one of Burns’ brothers died of cancer at age 47. Usually the most proper and circumspect of people, she started divulging details of her son’s demise to just about anyone and everyone within earshot, including random strangers.

“That, in my mind, was the beginning of the decline,” Burns recalled. “That’s when I noticed some things in her that weren’t ‘her.’ She became the Queen of Inappropriateness. It’s a very slow-moving train, and it’s going in the wrong direction.”

Though a traumatic event like the loss of a child is not likely a cause of Alzheimer’s disease or dementia, Burns suspects that the heartbreak of it was a catalyst. When she would launch into a disquisition on her son’s death, Burns would admonish her, “Don’t discuss that – it’s painful to you, and it’s painful to a stranger.”

His mother’s loose-tongued ways reached their nadir when she was tossed out of a restaurant she regularly frequented because she was talking incessantly to other patrons and bothering them.

Then, she also started giving money away to people she would bump into in the neighborhood around her home in the Allegheny County borough of Bellevue.

“You begin to see these things,” Burns explained. Alzheimer’s and dementia victims “have an incredible vulnerability. They have ‘ABUSE ME’ written on their foreheads in capital letters.”

Eventually, Burns moved his mother to Washington, where she lived with him, his wife and his daughter, who was then a teenager. But that created its own set of problems – no one was home during the day to keep an eye on her in case she fell, wandered off or got involved in some other type of mishap at home.

“It accelerated from there,” he said. “And she probably didn’t live two years after that.”

Jane Burns died April 24, 1994, at age 78. In the 20 years that have passed since her death, Burns believes Alzheimer’s and dementia are discussed much more freely now, and Burns himself is actively involved with the Alzheimer’s Association. He is sometimes asked for advice on how to weather the trials that come with having a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease. He usually warns against pointing fingers and blame-seeking.

“We all need to guard against finding someone to blame. It’s an illness. No one is to blame.”