When they\u2019re cremated and put in jars with their names etched on a plaque, then placed in a garden full of plaques, you\u2019ve still got somewhere to visit and know they are physically always here, just altered. I get worried about who they were, that the person vanished, especially when both my Nanny and Dziadek had dementia, how that cultivated a shifting state of vanishing and resurfacing before they were gone. It becomes so easy to remember them as the last couple of months of their lives, their thinning, balding bodies, confused and frustrated at being locked inside themselves. The condition is more invisible than I thought. You can\u2019t track when someone will remember everything, yet forget that they\u2019ve said the same sentence twenty three times over the past fifteen minutes. There are no default dementias, they all affect the individual in an individual way. You think it\u2019s all about memory too and it isn\u2019t. It\u2019s a physical disconnection from speech and body functions, from being able to access everything still whirling around in your head. No one really vanishes, they just become translated different, much like we all do when we\u2019re depressed or on drugs or euphorically happy or fucking.<\/p>\n
Grandad, Mum\u2019s Dad, calls me and asks if he should go visit Dziadek, Dad\u2019s Dad, as he\u2019s in hospital, dementia slowing his functions to a point of being bed bound. His muscles still work, he can touch his toes, but he keeps falling over and can\u2019t recall that he needs to eat. Grandad is unsure if he wants to see Dad\u2019s Dad like this, saying he\u2019d rather preserve the memories he\u2019s got. And I remember when his wife died, Mum\u2019s Mum, how Mum didn\u2019t let us through the glass sliding door into the lounge to say goodbye to an already quieted body, resting after all of its internal renovations from this condition, how that was an attempt to preserve all I shared with her Mum before she became this way.<\/p>\n