Songs not yet sung...

There is a time in every healthy life when we are vibrant with the feeling that the best is yet to be. Our heart and soul sing with anticipation. For some of us that feeling may come only once or twice in a lifetime, for others it arrives afresh each new season, and a few of us, I imagine, find it every morning. The sensation is rare enough to be savored, yet familiar enough to comfort us that it will both pass and come round again.
Just as with those songs of joy, there are songs of mourning and loss each one of us has or will encounter.
For my mother, an Alzheimer's patient in her 83rd year, there are no more songs to be sung.
No choruses of joy.
No ballads of times past.
No laments.
Nana loved to sing. She loved worship; the contemporary choruses, and the old gospel hymns. She loved Dean Martin, Perry Como, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Elvis Presley... But just as her voice has nearly been lost to the words of her favorites, her soul has been lost to the music of life's emotion.
She's left with confusion - a world that makes no sense. Her thinking, or the part of it she can express verbally, appears to have been captured in a sinusoidal wind of partially formed ideas and concepts much of the time. Then, as if the winds suddenly ceased, she may speak with perfect clarity.
Hallucinations confound her now (and me when I first tried to find what was causing them). She's left with anger and paranoia. Strangely, when she's most paranoid, she often communicates most clearly. She doesn't forget words, and her sarcasm and cruelty is pointed and jarring.
When this happens I get angry. Mostly not at her, although when it first began a few years ago, anger toward her was an emotion I had to work through. But I'm angry anew at this disease that has stolen our songs from us.
Our days of heading east together on Interstate 10 and belting out Yellow Submarine at the top of our lungs have ended far too soon. But it's not only that. It's that what we're left with has nearly wiped out those crazy, happy memories, and I'm pissed.