I’m visiting my 76 year old dad this week, and he’s got dementia pretty bad. He can still care for himself (with stepmom’s help) and eat and walk. He just asks the same questions 3 times in 2 minutes. Is surprised anytime someone tells him he has dementia, like he’s getting the diagnosis for the first time. Tells the same 10 recollections over and over. Asks what we’re watching every minute we’ve got a show on, and responds like he hasn’t seen that show in years (he watches the same shows, Andy Griffith and Beverly Hillbillies every night).
The metaphor I’d use to describe this is: It’s like looking at a familiar jigsaw puzzle, but many of the pieces are missing, and big chunks of it are scattered around and mixed up. You can still see the picture it was, but it’s just jumbled with several holes in it.
Anyone else have a metaphor to describe watching someone slip away from dementia?
It sucks. The man I once knew as my father-in-law no longer exists. Altho his body is still there, and looks like him, and sounds like him - it’s not him any more.
The big guy that was raised on a farm in Ohio, went to Vietnam and fixed helicopters to be flown out from behind enemy lines, worked his entire civilian life for one airline going up the leadership ladder working on airliner engines, and grand-dad with the full-room train table - is gone. But he’s not really gone, as he’s just a frail and confused and weepy old shell of himself that no longer recognizes family or friend. The him of five years ago would be horrified. Did I mention that this sucks?
My divorced, single mom from the seventies kept me in the (probably willing) dark for at least 4 years. There is no metaphor. Or at least I’m not that creative. I went in to a fugue state when I entered her house for the last time–unwashed dishes, mold, and the utilities being cut off while we were there. The next 9 months were a mix of the absolute worst and reasonably decent. I wanted to live 2000 miles from my parents, but it had it’s price.
As, I am watching, someone who is forgetting, and losing themselvess to Dementia. And as someone who had paranoiac, and bipolar, schizo affective tendecies, I csn’t help but see some of these tendencies coming through in this dementia patient. She is slowly losing her cognition and memory anad blaming friends, and family for outlandish things in suspicion and paranoia, only because she doesn’t remember her own actions history. The decline can be mean, one minded, stubborn, paranoid, and painful.
Yes, it sucks. I went through this with my late wife - Parkinson’s dementia - in late 2003, early 2004. Some of you who were around then may remember my posts on her condition. (I don’t feel like diving back into that particular hellhole).
On YouTube, there’s a music project called Everywhere At The End Of Time
It’s a long album, and you need to be in the right headspace to listen to it, it starts as some repetitious 30’s-40’s old-timey ballroom but as it progresses, it decays, mirroring the decay of one’s mind as neural pathways fail.
Quite haunting and it is one of those pieces of media that is so good, but not something you’d want to put yourself through again.
I’ve left this as a search link so people are fully aware what they’re getting themselves into.
My late aged MIL did not have dementia. But she did have a series of mini-strokes that robbed her of all her ambition and most of her worry. As well as her problem-solving skills; she’d lose track of a train of logic somewhere along the way and collapse into “I don’t know what to do”.
It also slowly removed much of her ability to form new memories. She was fine to converse with about the old days. Her stories as told now were about the same when she’d told them years before.
But a conversation about events this week would amount to this simplified schematic:
Yesterday we had an especially nice dinner, but I don’t remember what I ate. I had a nice conversation with somebody, but I don’t remember who. Or what we talked about. But it was nice. The history teacher that comes in once a week to give a talk gave a great talk. but I don’t remember what it was about. But it was great. I was watching CNN earlier today and they were very upset about inflation. I don’t know who was talking or what exactly they said about it, but it was bad.
And all along, she’d be struggling to remember certain common words. Names, even names she’d said a thousand times, but also other nouns. “Teapot”, “coffee cup”, etc. She totally knew the concept she was aiming for, but often could not generate the word, despite many seconds of struggling before just moving on with a “you know what I mean”. Which we did; it was always obvious from context.
She had insight into her growing problems, and greatly feared it getting worse. A heart attack one night finished her off while her mind was still about as I’ve described. That was a mercy I suppose.
I watched my mom, who worked in the engineering dept of an aircraft company [on the X-1] got a university degree, army wife who raised 2 kids after one kid passed from leukemia watch a documentary on WW2 aircraft and not even remember SHE worked there. Then I watched her have to go into a managed care facility when she could no longer care for herself and got past my brother’s ability to care for her, to not even remembering me in the final 3 years of her life.
I have discussed it with mrAru, if I get a solid diagnosis of Alzheimers/dementia, I am offing myself before I lose myself. I am not putting him through all that angst and expense for a hollow shell sitting in a wheelchair. And no, this is not a ‘cry for help’, I am not actively suicidal.
Nancy Reagan, if indeed it was her, nailed it, the long goodbye. Lost my Dad 21 years ago, an attorney, economist, speechwriter for Reagan and Goldwater among others, lost his ability to speak. COULD NOT SPEAK. It started with have problems calling things by name, "pass me the ____________. He didn’t know plate.
Now Mom. At 97, her recall is less than a minute, hell, less than 15 seconds. She puts something in her mouth at lunch and a second or 2 later asks “what’s in my mouth?” She has (and I know y’all won’t believe this) pulled out most her teeth. We realized she was digging them out with metal eating utensils, so we told the home plastic only, but she gets her hands on metal, no matter what. On hospice now and we wait.
Thanks for the clarification. I imagine that had she lived long enough and had the strokes continued occurring she’d eventually have had real swiss cheese for brains and become mostly inert.
As it was she lasted 96 years 8 months and was still doing pretty much normally mentally up to about age 92/93.
Yes, my father’s Dx was vascular dementia. Caused they said by severely restricted blood flow to the brain. His heart issues started in his 40’s and I doubt it helped that my mother forbade him to take his cholesterol meds.
My mum moved 400km away from the ‘kids’ (all grown) to marry a farmer back in 1980. So as she aged, I didn’t see her all that often, maybe two or three times a year, but I did notice in her late 70’s a decided deterioration in her thought processes. To be honest, it was to be expected as my maternal grandmother had developed dementia in her late 70’s too.
Thankfully my stepfather (still going strong at 93) chose to care for my mum despite the difficulties in doing so, loathe to put her into a nursing home. But one time I visited, perhaps a year or so before she died, and as we sat hand in hand on the couch together, she looked at me, and said oh so sweetly, “You look JUST like my daughter you know!”. At that point, I knew she was gone.
Anyway, my stepdad had to bite the bullet in the end and mum went into a high-dependency nursing unit. She passed just 8 weeks later thank fuck.
I wouldn’t wish any form of dementia upon my worst enemy. It robs you of your humanness, your personhood and your very essence. When my time comes (unless some miracle treatment arises) I too will be looking at a way out, before I become a blob in a bed.
My mother-in-law has earlyish stage Alzheimer’s. She’s a weird combination of very organized (as we saw when we were clearing out their files), and forgetful - she’d tell the same stories, multiple times in an hour.
And it strips away many of the learned social behaviors. MIL tended to dwell on old hurts, over, and over, and over, and over, and over; rarely on the good things.
A friend whose mother had pretty severe dementia toward the end once told her “Oh, your name is xxx? I have a daughter with that same name!”.
I think it’s not so much that the memories are completely gone, but that the connections between them aren’t good any more.
Not dementia, but my 76-year-old dad was diagnosed with Parkinson around the very start of the Covid pandemic.
Like @snowthx 's father-in-law, the dad I have known all my life is slowly disappearing. He was never a sporty guy, but he was always there. Never sick. Active. Reliable. Solid.
But now, he clings to my mom’s arm whenever they go out, and his slow, hunched gait is that of an old man. He draws blanks on what he’s saying mid-sentence. He keeps on forgetting where he put things, and gets frustrated about it, so he’s clearly aware of the fact that there’s something wrong.
In retrospect, some warning signs were already apparent 5 years ago.
He’d always been the best driver I knew. Careful. Prepared. Experienced. He used to drive tanks when he was 18. But once, as he was taking me and my daughters from the train station, he swerved widely to the right for no reason. Another time, he drove straight ahead at an intersection where there were only two roads, one going left, the other right. Both times he looked confused and embarassed afterwards. I chalked it up to his getting older then, although I was shocked by those extremely unusual blunders. I now realize they were probably the first symptoms.
It looks as if his body is just a shell now, with the contents slowly, invisibly draining away.
My 90-something FIL had some form of dementia. He went from being a gentle, loving, kind man to a marginally violent and foul-mouthed creature. He called his wife of 73 years a bitch! He never in his life uttered that word. And he threatened her on more than one occasion. He also thought there were two of her - the “nice” one and the “mean” one. The last few months of his life were pretty much hell for her as she watched her beloved husband devolve into a stranger.
I only hope she treasures the good memories and forgets the end of his days. He’d have been mortified to know he treated her that way. It was hard on all of us.
I remember my wife’s mother in her declining years. The main problem seemed to be that short term memory didn’t get in to long term memory. She could carry on what seemed to be a fairly plausible conversation for a short while, but 10 minutes later had no recollection of it. She didn’t have classic Altzheimers, I think. But no form of dementia is good.
“Fading” is the word that keeps hitting me as I watch my dad decline. Not turning invisible/transparent, but maybe sort of. When he asks the same question four times within fifteen minutes because he genuinely doesn’t remember asking it before, it’s almost like he’s physically losing presence as his mind slips even further.