Dementia
From a purely administrative viewpoint, we lost Mum early last December.
The reality is that we’d lost her years before that.
Dementia is subtle, but is one of the cruelest diseases I know. Everyone, the sufferer and their families, lose each other by a thousand small cuts. Everyone’s journey is different, but there are common milestones along the way. You take no comfort in welcoming other people to those stops, but you know they’re coming and you know when they’ve arrived.
We saw it with other people in the nursing home; you see them mostly happy, then mostly confused. Then you don’t see them.
Before it gets to that stage it can start with forgetting the small things, like closing the door at night, or forgetting to turn off the light.
Then it progresses to larger things — forgetting to turn off the cooker, or how to cook, even things they’ve done for decades. My mum forgot how to make a cup of tea.
Forgetting details of friends, acquaintances, loved ones. First only relatively small details – but the larger ones follow, inevitably.
The list is almost endless. Sufferers forget where they are, why they’re there, why they can’t go back home.
Mum lost her memories, but retained the ability to get by for quite some time. It was in the hospital, when the assessing doctor asked her who I was and when I was born, that it truly came home to me. She turned to me and, as if making a joke, said “that’s right, who are you?”. Normally, people had played along, given her the answer, or let her skip the question on the basis that *of course* she knew who her son was. That day, I didn’t do those things. And that day, I discovered she didn’t know.
Forgetting how to walk. How to eat.
How to breathe.
Like most people, I suspect, my mental image of Alzheimer’s before direct experience of it was relatively gentle. The classic “ask the same question three times,” a humorous caricature.
It is nothing like that. It’s vicious, cold, cruel, and extended, and I hate it with a passion. The day we finally beat this disease, I will be celebrating.
(For the avoidance of any doubt here — everyone’s journey is different. What I describe won’t happen to everyone, but it did happen to us.)