Dementia

Dementia that scourge which is claiming more victims simply because we are living longer is acknowledged but little understood.
I have just finished reading an article written by a carer who took over the role of living in the house of a old 90 year old man suffering dementia.
What was startling in the article, was the way we misinterpret what memory loss means and underestimate the importance of memory in the way we function.
Memory allows us to remember not just people and events but also the minute by minute reason to function in a way that depends on knowing. Take away the 'knowing' and the emptiness is overpowering. All the connections we make, as we do what ever we do are absent. There is no continuity since there is no memory to provide us with any perspective.
A question elicits an answer but the moment the answer is given it is forgotten and only the question has any relevance to the patient. Language, "asking questions" is the last vestige of the Alzheimer patient trying to make sense of anything, the answers are superfluous since they can't be remembered but the repetition of asking provides some sort of umbilical connection not to someone you remember but in a sense, to yourself.
For the carer there is the awful subterfuge that there is "a conversation" and that the words or the repeated answers to the repeated questions are part of some sort of human communication whilst in fact the communication is all one sided.
It's this facile façade that makes the whole process of caring such a unforgiving source of pain.
The person in front of us is physically there but the mind with which we identify that person has gone and we strive at our peril, to try to find what we had, even yesterday !