Memories are as precious as time and help bridge the gap between the past and the present, but for more than five million Americans living with Alzheimer’s, the past slowly slips away as the disease progresses. To help shine a light on the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S, Bellevue First Methodist Church joined hundreds of organizations across the country in hosting a day of remembrance.

The event marked November as National Alzheimer’s Disease Awareness Month.

The Bellevue church welcomed community members who have been touched by the disease to join in participation of a Candle Lighting Ceremony in mid-November. The event was sponsored by the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America, a non-profit organization raising awareness of the disease and related illnesses.

Individuals filled the pews in the main sanctuary for the candlelight service, words of encouragement and the reading of the names of loved ones who are living with the disease or who have passed on.

More than 20 names were read aloud.

“Some people have more than one person in their family or circle of friends who are impacted by Alzheimer’s,” explained Nancy Berry, Director of Congregational Care for Bellevue First Methodist Church. “The numbers are only rising.”

During the service, The Rev. Dr. Beryl Ingram gave a brief sermon, speaking words of comfort and healing.

Tears were shed as one-by-one, each person made their way to the front of the sanctuary to light individual candles in memory of those who can no longer remember. Alzheimer’s not only affects the one with the disease, but reaches out to family members, friends, communities and caregivers. The strain of caring for a loved one suffering from the slow progressing disease can take its toll, those involved say.

In the late 1990s, Berry watched as her mother’s memory slowly slipped away over a five-year period. She and her sister knew very little about the disease at the time and adapted as best they could as their mother’s disease progressed.

“We had known for some time that there was something not right,” Berry said. “My mother wasn’t one who wandered or became hostile, so we were fortunate in that regard, but she became more and more uncommunicative,” Berry explained. “At first we thought she was losing her hearing and she was confused. We soon realized it was something more.”

Individuals experiencing cognitive difficulties or noticing them in loved ones are encouraged to visit a physician for a proper diagnosis. According to the AFA, there are symptoms that closely mimic Alzheimer’s, but are treatable such as hearing lose, a minor stroke, depression and extreme stress.

Even if an individual shows no signs of cognitive difficulties, having a regular memory screening every five years or so is a good way to create a marker for future memory test to be measured against.

In recent years, new discoveries of treatments have been developed to help in slowing the progression of the disease.

For people like Berry, who have been impacted by the disease, there is hope.

“Up until the very end we would ask our mother to pray before we ate together and she could. She knew how to talk to God because she had doing it her whole life,” Berry said.

Through the hardship and pain, Berry found joy in the little things that would help her mother remember.

“She responded to animals. I would bring my kitten to visit with her and I would hear her petting the kitten and whispering, I love you,” Berry recalled about the last few years of her mother’s life. “She also would see a bird outside the window and wouldn’t remember the word for it but would call it animal. She responded very well to the natural world and things that were deeply rooted from childhood.”

Towards the end, Berry became as worried, if not more so, about her sister than her mother because of the difficulty of caring fulltime for a person with Alzheimer’s.

“My sister gave everything she had, but I could see her becoming stressed, overwhelmed and ultimately depressed. That’s very common in caregivers,” Berry said. “Caregivers often become ill after the person they are caring for dies because they have not afforded themselves the luxury of being sick or taking care of themselves,” she explained.

Care for caregivers is a component to overall well-being and is part of the work that the Alzheimer’s Foundation does.

“There is tremendous social isolation of family caregivers in the sense that they feel alone and nobody really knows what they are going through, when in fact there are at least five million other families in this situation,” Berry said.

To this day, no cure has been found for the disease.

For more information or to find resources on the disease, visit www.alzfdn.org.

Lindsay Larin can be reached at llarin@bellevuereporter.com or at 425-453-4602.