Dementia

Dare Not Speak its Name

My sixty-something neighbor rang my bell the other day. When I answered, he started asking me gibberish questions – “Where are my car keys?” “Are they at the Elks Club?” When I offered to drive him there to get his keys he seemed even more confused … pointing in the wrong direction and demurring to my offer of help. I had known that he was losing contact with reality … spending hour upon hour chopping ice around his driveway … but this was the first clear manifestation of what appeared to me as early-onset Alzheimer’s … and it has unnerved me.

My mother in her later years also developed dementia … first as a sundown syndrome … then later as fully impaired cognition. Her last three or four years were not pretty as I watched her, in her late eighties, sink into a world of enfeebled disorientation.  (Yet remarkably, toward the end, she received a call from her old college roommate and spent 15 minutes in a perfectly normal conversation with her.) My mother’s mother too had experienced much the same downward spiral … spending her last few years in a fetal position.  And what does this presage for me? Possibly not good stuff.

At seventy-five I am now extremely sensitive to my own cognitive capabilities and suffer mild panic attacks at what may be the slightest slippage of same. Not remembering the right word to express a thought or falling asleep in my easy chair in the late afternoon … each casts a pall on my outlook for my golden years. Unfortunately, today there is not a lot that can be done to reverse this mental degeneration, so I guess I might have to travel this gloomy path so encumbered.  But the real downer is the fear of what such a syndrome, if it does befall me, might do to those loved ones around me.

Sorry dear readers for all this doom and gloom, but I need to try to disperse this cloud.  Perhaps, this blog may be my own palliative way of keeping  my synapses firing?