Best of 2019: Finding Beauty in Alzheimer’s
Editor’s note: As 2019 turns into 2020, we’re taking the opportunity to look back at some of our best and biggest stories of the year. This profile of Sarah Smith and her mother “Beauty,” by Bianca R. Montes is one of those stories.
Sarah Smith said her mother wanted her to be fearless.
Fearless as a young gymnast who gave up normalcy for hour-long drives twice a day to practices that had her up well before the sun rose and back home after 10 p.m. Fearless as a teenager who struggled to find herself in high school after giving up gymnastics. Fearless as a Christian.
“Fix your eyes on the Lord – be Sarah,” her mother would say.
Who would have ever thought that Sarah would have to be fearless for her mother?
Sarah was a young mother when she started to notice a tempering in her mother’s behavior; the once pristine emails she’d send were full of typos, and her “I’m a strong woman” mentality was clouded with incessant crying.
