For those of you whose parent or whoever is still lucid, but highly forgetful, can you have a conversation about their own experience of being themselves now? What is it like to be a “faded” person in @veryfrank’s apt terms?
I asked this question six years ago and got a little useful info:
I started that thread in the early decline of my aged MIL. She died last year and was still quite capable mentally on her last day.
@LSLGuy I had a conversation about this with my father in 2004 when he was 92, a year or 2 after he first started showing symptoms of dementia. He was a brilliant man, a scholar and college professor who had taught history and philosophy. He taught part time until he was 84 and was energetic and mentally sharp until he was 90. We had to take the shovel out of his hands to stop him from shoveling snow (there were 4 younger men in the house to do it) He was proud of the fact that his grandfather had lived to 97, lucid until the end.
When I talked to him about the issue, it was because he knew what was happening and was anxious and upset about it. He said “I’m in bad shape and I don’t know who I am any more.” When I tried to reassure him, repeating his name and telling him that we would take care of him, he said “I try to remember but I feel like everything is falling away from me.”
And it was heartbreaking to see everything fall away from him over the next 5 years. At least the anxiety diminished and he became more placid. He was 97 when he died.
I watched my ex wife slip away slowly over a period of about 12 years, Now she is an empty shell. She tried her best to hide it. It is heart breaking. There are a few drugs that Dr’s seem a bit too free with that magnify the problem greatly. One that I know of is Seroquel and the other is to stop frequent urination, I can’t remember the name.
Family friends (the in-laws’ only remaining close friends, in Florida) are struggling with the wife’s mental slippage. They are in their late 80s. She was diagnosed with cancer a few months back, of a sort that they decided to just let run its course - I don’t know the details, but it was either not treatable, or she couldn’t withstand the treatment.
And it has affected her mind. When we were there in February, MIL told us of how one day, the wife went outside and wandered, and the husband had to track her down (he later put locks on the insides of the doors to prevent that), and on another occasion, she called the police to say he was hitting her. They came, saw there was not a mark on her, and did not file any charges.
Yet, a few weeks later, we were down there closing out the condo, and visited the couple briefly, and she seemed fine - having a good day, I guess.
The husband told us “I’m nearly 90, and right now I have more responsibilities than I have ever had in my life”. He seemed so exhausted, mentally and physically.
Landslips
Words fall away
In slow erosion
Inch by inch
My garden is lost to the sea
The face of a husband
The name of a child
I wait at the window
When my FIL was slipping rapidly into the dementia pit, his behavior became increasingly bizarre and unlike himself, as others are mentioning. We would not hear from them for a number of days so my wife would go over to their place to find my MIL in a bed in the guest room, door closed, in the dark, hiding (from FIL). His behavior and demands were overwhelming her, consuming her life, such that I think she has a touch of PTSD now from that year or so of living like that. I think she was expecting it to pass, or that he’d start to get better - it wont get better, only worse, and the best that can be hoped for is that the getting worse is not rapid.
On reflection, this is unsettlingly like GPT-type chatbots. It seems as if the ‘sentence generation logic’ in her brain was still functioning well enough that it could produce responses that were syntactically and grammatically correct and sufficiently on-topic to convince a casual observer (like several doctors) that they were interacting with a lucid and rational mind.
But on closer and longer term observation, it was clear that she had no memory or understanding of the actual conversation. In some ways this was more disturbing than more obvious types of dementia.