The question we all give and get when one of us visits my dad in his LTC facility, strangely his home now really, is “Did he know you?”
With Dementia, the adult, once complete with so many full and complex aspects creating an enormous and 3 dimensional personality, moves slowly backwards to the childhood, then toddlerhood then babyhood we all started with complete with diapers and puree food and full time care for the simplest efforts.
It is very very hard to watch in someone you love.
Complex thoughts become simple. Laughter you once worked hard to get from them, comes easily, if even at odd times. Sentences, once so clever and thoughtful and full of insight, become simple and often nonsensical, then abbreviated, then unfinished. And then nothing.
But everything becomes the new norm, the family adjusts and the hardest things on earth become part of your narrative.
You have no choice but to accept it.
All of you, though, have your thing that is too hard for you. It might be he does not make eye contact, it might be the sparkle is gone, it might be that he can’t walk or hardly speaks. It might be the stark difference between how beautifully you live and move and do and think and laugh and smile and swim and run and love and play and work and read and think and eat and LIVE and the way he does not.
But it is always, for all of us, hard when he does not know us.
Today I went to see him and no he did not know me.
But stranger than that I did not know him.
I walked by him in the hallway, the late morning hallway, where they all sit and stare, and I did not recognise him. I looked down the hallway and right at him but something in the way the light was hitting him or the stillness of his face or something- I did not recognize him.
I ran around looking for him and asking for him and the nurse looked at me funny and said- “Did you not see him? He is right there”
I did not see him.
