Subject: Dementia.


There are a few subjects which frighten us more than dementia since we are all largely at risk of dementia  in some form or other. The most known symptoms are, loss of memory but the outward manifestation can reveal themselves as mood changes and the apparent disconnect in personal response. Anger is one of the manifestations, anger on all sides, both the sufferers and the people left behind by the departing person who are angry about their inability to cope and having to rejig their thought processes to compensate. Children of a dementia parent fear their inability  to cope often at a time when they themselves are at a crossroad and worry a great deal about their own children’s path through a rapidly changing world.
When I was growing up dementia was almost unknown, people died before dementia manifest itself but today, with modern medicine people live into old age with little if any realisation that aging itself kills by small cuts and in many ways.
Perhaps we have pushed the medical ‘can do’ envelope too far without looking at a plausible end to life condition for people to discover for themselves
The artificiality  of body and mind, prolonged after its course has run but which medical science insists isn't a problem so long as there is a heart beat.
I’m of the opinion that the person suffering dementia is far less aware of their condition than we, the non dementia observer, whilst we try to judge them as if they still had those faculties which we measure a person by.   It’s the family and friends who suffer as they try to adapt to the ghost of the person they once knew.
If your surroundings become enveloped in mist then the dimension of your reality is reduced to what you can see and given that this reality becomes the norm, like deafness or limits to mobility then the adaption to dementia is in the eye of the beholder.
End of life pain relief has to be a critical red line and we should all make preparation to take matters in our own hand and not leave it in the hand of the doctor.
Society is coming to terms with death being as natural as life and the heavy hand of religion is slowly being prised away from our understanding of ethics. The secret service agent was reputed to carry a pill if caught, not for his avoidance of the horror of torture but for the information he/she might reveal. The essence is therefore not the individuals salvation but the groups salvation, a group think as self-centred  as we can conceive but also in line with humanities lack of understanding.
So in line with death, dementia is another phase of the unknown, to be more precise the ‘unknowable’ since we are both the observer and the observed.