Like so many people out there, I know someone – in this case, my father – who has advancing dementia. There have been numerous articles and books written on the subject, but really, I don’t think the harsh reality of this cruel and debilitating condition can be fully conveyed through scientific journals. For all of you out there who have a good friend or relative suffering with this disease, I know you will fully understand just what I mean.
It is always interesting and yet frustrating that in our global society, we always assume it is the afflicted individuals who suffer. Ahem! I beg to differ! Those in an advanced state of dementia often have no concept that the greatest misery is often endured by those long suffering individuals around them who can do little but watch their deterioration. Their shrinking brains are such that unhappily they only see the world through their own vastly reduced limits, often becoming incredibly inward looking, selfish, paranoid and downright infuriating. How on earth can mere words and abstract scientific observations convey the sheer hopelessness, frustration, despair and suppressed anger of those nearest and dearest to the afflicted, those unsung tireless heroes (and heroines like my poor mother) who sacrifice so much of their own lives caring for their loved ones day by day, who live on and on often for many years, sinking further and further into that hopeless mire of helplessness and confusion? It has been said that dementia afflicts more than just the individual. Like any insidious disease, it spreads its’ tentacles to encompass us all.
After observing my own poor father, I have likened his symptoms to something from the works of Salvador Dali. You know, that famous (but crazy) Spanish artist who designed those weird and wonderful buildings in Barcelona, and who painted pictures that showed things like melting clocks and tigers leaping out of eggs. For that is how the mind of a dementia patient often works. To put it in another context, when you watch that wonderful smooth picture on your LED TV, that is how a healthy brain works – smooth, ripple free transmission, each movement and process flowing effortlessly into the next. In the mind of the dementia sufferer, those flawless pictures have become pixellated, broken up into bitsy flashing pixels as if disrupted somewhere by a jack hammer nearby on the roadside. Those pixellated images flicker and jumble around in the brain like they don on the TV, all of them trying to slot together in order to make sense. In a healthy person they do. In the mind of the dementia patient, those pixels come together any old how, giving a badly fragmented version of events, and that topsy turvy, surreal world of half truths and misinformation is now the afflicted person’s only reality. When I see my father arguing with people on the TV and trying to make contact with them, waving to them, showing them his photo albums and even trying to invite them to come in and sit down for a cuppa, it is a tragicomic scene. And the worst of it is, he will never, ever believe you when you tell him those TV people are not real.
In the words of Martin Luther King, I have a dream. I have a dream where there is a world where deserving souls do not have to waste their lives in endless toil enslaved to the needs of these hapless shambling remnants of once proud, intelligent men and women. I have a dream where we can somehow find the means to enable everyone to live out their lives in peace and dignity and a degree of independence. I have a dream that we can look forward to age with a level of good faith, knowing that we won’t finish our lives as a neglected, drooling, rambling husk of humanity confined to some wicker cane chair in a rest home or shoved into a back room in the house of a long suffering relative, out of sight and out of mind. With all the billions spent on weaponry, space travel and mega salaries for sports stars and leading CEOs, imagine the difference to us all if even a fraction of that money went into further solving this global plague upon us all.
We can but dream!
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Latest release “The Rival”, following the hilarious pawprints of a spoiled cat fighting his mistress’s no-good boyfriend for mastery, is now available via https://www.createspace.com/5016577
Don’t forget the following books for all fantasy lovers over the age of 10! With the last of the Hobbit films released in December, you can’t go past these for timely last minute Xmas ideas!
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