I
To quote Graham Harthill:
"Memory rots
leaving gaps and punctuation,
Empty quotation marks."
"Mild Cognitive Impairment" sounds like an insignificant affliction, perhaps equivalent in severity to age-related impairment of visual or auditory acuity.
But it represents the beginning of the inexorable decay of memory, intellect and personality, the end-point of which is a shuffling, confused likeness of someone formerly loving and loved.
My mother was 64 when I first noticed that she was not remembering. Little things at first.
She had always been a very pretty woman and still looked younger than her age, perhaps fiftyish - bright, vivacious, affectionate, intelligent.
I resisted my sister's anxiety that this was the prodrome of dementia, which our maternal grandmother had suffered.
But it was.
It took her life, but it took it's time. 21 years of inexorable deterioration of her intellect and her personality.
Her final 10 years were spent in confusion and fear. She slept physically restrained, waking each day in a strange new place completely occupied by strangers.
Each awakening was accompanied by the terror of not knowing who or where she was.
She died, at last, with nurses withholding the morphine which had been prescribed to palliate the suffering of her terminal hours, for fear of causing addiction. FFS.
*********
I have noticed how tempting it can be to respond to inconvenient questioning by claiming not to remember, avoiding the burden of thought, and how habit-forming this can become.
I wonder if this is how dementia starts.
(Do you remember Ronald Reagan I-don't-recalling at the Federal Grand Jury Iran-Contra enquiry?)
Maybe it's karma.
For perfectionists, for whom even the most treasured and affirming memories are disfigured by recollections of minor personal or imagined failures, how seductive must be the contemplation of the peace of forgetfulness.
If only the loss could be selective, leaving intact the memories of happy times, beauty, love, personal triumphs, and ablating all the crap.
If only.
On the other hand, is that not why the wee drappie was invented?
Slainte!
To quote Graham Harthill:
"Memory rots
leaving gaps and punctuation,
Empty quotation marks."
"Mild Cognitive Impairment" sounds like an insignificant affliction, perhaps equivalent in severity to age-related impairment of visual or auditory acuity.
But it represents the beginning of the inexorable decay of memory, intellect and personality, the end-point of which is a shuffling, confused likeness of someone formerly loving and loved.
My mother was 64 when I first noticed that she was not remembering. Little things at first.
She had always been a very pretty woman and still looked younger than her age, perhaps fiftyish - bright, vivacious, affectionate, intelligent.
I resisted my sister's anxiety that this was the prodrome of dementia, which our maternal grandmother had suffered.
But it was.
It took her life, but it took it's time. 21 years of inexorable deterioration of her intellect and her personality.
Her final 10 years were spent in confusion and fear. She slept physically restrained, waking each day in a strange new place completely occupied by strangers.
Each awakening was accompanied by the terror of not knowing who or where she was.
She died, at last, with nurses withholding the morphine which had been prescribed to palliate the suffering of her terminal hours, for fear of causing addiction. FFS.
*********
I have noticed how tempting it can be to respond to inconvenient questioning by claiming not to remember, avoiding the burden of thought, and how habit-forming this can become.
I wonder if this is how dementia starts.
(Do you remember Ronald Reagan I-don't-recalling at the Federal Grand Jury Iran-Contra enquiry?)
Maybe it's karma.
For perfectionists, for whom even the most treasured and affirming memories are disfigured by recollections of minor personal or imagined failures, how seductive must be the contemplation of the peace of forgetfulness.
If only the loss could be selective, leaving intact the memories of happy times, beauty, love, personal triumphs, and ablating all the crap.
If only.
On the other hand, is that not why the wee drappie was invented?
Slainte!
