poem/song lyrics about dementia

[Moostache]

5. Thank you for bringing attention to the issue...

My grandmother lived to be 97 years old, but her final 15 years were spent in a state of terror and unfamiliarity with the world around her and the family that she loved and that loved her as well. I have a 4-generation photo of myself, my father and my son with her a few months before her deterioration really started.

The photo haunts me both for the sense of love and loss it provides me and for the replay of this I am now living with my father. Dad survived mom's 18-year fight with cancer, COVID-19 isolation and a massive stroke in 2021 that should have been fatal if he had not been visiting my sister and the stroke recognized by her in time to get him help immediately. Now, dementia is setting in and he is losing once again. He passed 80 years old and his reward for a life of planning and saving and being in relative good health has been to be a widower in a strange place and increasingly lonely time.

Dad can't handle his bills any longer, he can't form new memories as easily as he once did...he still retains the past....when my siblings and I were chidden, when HE was a child...but he can't remember the start of a conversation from 15 minutes ago. He can't remember any of the 9 grandchildren's birthdays or the youngest's recent milestones (first communion, grade school plays). When we lost mom, I feared that dad would pass soon after (and his stroke was only 6 months after mom's passing), but he survived and did so with a miraculous lack of lost function - no movement deficit or speech impairment, no paralysis...a real miracle of modern medicine given the seriousness of the clot and the size of what they were able to clear and save him.

And now the cruelest blows of all are raining down on us. Dad can't make new friends because he is embarrassed by not being able to follow along with conversations or remember the people's names from the beginning of a meal to the end. He gets confused in large rooms because the auditory inputs overwhelm his ability to focus on conversations, the things that once came easily and naturally in social settings are laborious and overwhelming. Its a helpless feeling to know there is nothing that can staunch this crushing tide. Today is as good as its likely to ever get again, and it may not get quite that good again. I find myself almost helpless at times locked into inaction by feelings of guilt and remorse and not wanting to make things harder for dad at the same time not being able to make it easier either.

Dementia is the silent, prolonged death and its cruelty is every bit as mentally devastating as cancer was physically. I try to remain up beat and focus less on the bad days and more on the moments we still laugh and share time together, but I can't help but also slide into a little depression of my own feeling that I am watching a preview of my own demise at the same time I am living it with dad the way he did with grandma...that 4 generation photo stares back at me and time's passage is keenly felt in it. I was just 32 years old in the photo, Dad was 60 and grandma was 81. It feels like yesterday though and that scares me because while that photo is now 20 years ago, I can't shake at times how recent it feels and how that translates to the future as well.

I pray for more good days than bad for dad, and by extension for myself. I feel guilty all the time for being frightened by the condition and leery of its potential to be my own fate as well, seeing as the genetic lottery tickets in my direct lineage don't come up jackpot. Knowing that the problem is not isolated does not make it easier right now as I navigate it, but it does provide the kind of communal comfort that comes from knowing there are others who are feeling this too right now and that we can talk about it and draw strength from each other as a result.