You Say

     You say you get "it." 

     I've done my research also.  I was the one who first brought up his symptoms which fit the diagnosis, even before the two neuro-docs concurred.  I've worked with old folks who had dementia-- a whole variety of dementias-- for many years.  Things got different when Dad caught it.  Suddenly, I was the crazed family member who could not keep Dad at home.  I was the one that the younger staff members looked upon with suspicion wondering if-- or when-- I will come down with it also.

     I know-- from my own brain damage-- that after the brain gets loosened up, the brain goes into survival mode.  Part of that change
is a self-centered centering at a time when all of the middles are 
rapidly exploding into lesions of scarification.  Dad's utter and total
self-centeredness is not something he would have chosen for himself.  Through the passage of time, my own survival mechanisms have allowed me a bit less self-centeredness.  Dad, not so much.  His brain is getting bombarded with lesions and there is scarsely time to breathe in-between new formations. 

     You say you get "it."  You say you understand his dementia.

     Dad is not a case.  He is not the L.B.D. in room three.  He is the man with a failing brain that I love with a fierceness even through all of his atypical neurology messing around in his head.  My heart breaks every day.  My heart breaks next door.  Yours breaks from a distance. 

     This dementia has made us strange to each other.  We cling to our separate life rafts in our separate spheres, each of us with our own twisted and bleeding wounds.  I thought perhaps that our two rafts could connect.  We could traverse the rugged seas in tandem, both of us supporting the other as we also support ourselves and Dad.  The winds whip up in fury screaming, "Not to be.  Not to be."  Instead, I've found a cousin and an aunt [who is not Dad's sister but my mother's sister] and my life partner and a doctor who each bring their own brands of wisdom to my life raft and who help me to support Dad.

     But this is not wholly about any of us.  We are the bystanders.  Dad is the one who is fantastically and utterly consumed.  We are losing one person.  He is losing everyone.  He has already lost so much. 

     You say you get "it."  You say you understand his dementia.  Can you please explain it to me?

~ sapphoq on life ~