My Dad suffered with Alzheimers for at least four and a half years, my Mum valiantly took care of him at home whilst looking after my Grandma with the same condition. Eventually it just became too difficult and we were literally forced to put them both into care.
It was the most gut wrenching moment of my life – the interim care home Dad was placed in wasn’t great. My heart was broken as I left him every day. I took solace in the shared experiences of people on this website. We finally got him into a care home in close proximity to where my Mum lived, where the staff were literally angels. He had 3 years in this care home, and believe it or not he was happy. The dementia had fogged his mind, our conversations were largely meaningless, but I would get clear and regular indications of the fact that the essence of my Dad, his fundamental and intrinsic personality was still there.
My Mum and Dad adopted me when I was young. I’m very live to the nature versus nurture debate. There are elements of my personality, of the man I became which I attribute to them and their influence. But there are elements of my personality which I feel are preconditioned or predetermined, anomalies which I don’t recognise as being characteristics of my adoptive parents or things which I inherited from them. These are the things that are effectively hardwired into me. Some are good, some are bad, but the one thing is that they largely haven’t been able to be eroded by external childhood or lifestyle influences. I believe them to be my very essence.
In the same way as I believe that childhood conditioning cannot change some of the core components of who we are, so I believe there are some indelible elements of who we are that cannot be destroyed by the brutality of dementia. This is purely my subjective view, there are some people that talk about the unrecognisable nature of their loved ones and that is such a challenging position to be in. My encouragement would be to always search for the ‘glimmer’ and when it comes enjoy the fleeting moment. To people at the start of this journey, my advice would be to spot the things that are familiar, cling onto them, it could be a smile, a wink, or something they say.
Lots of people think and say that because Dad had dementia when he passed away last week was ‘a blessing’ or ‘its for the best’. These are well intentioned comments from people trying to be kind, and I would never admonish them – BUT my Dad had the capacity to be happy until the day he died. He was wheel chair bound, he couldn’t have solid food, he was incontinent, he had lost all sense of reason, but when I put Dads Army on the TV he would cry with laughter. He would pull faces, he would make jokes. Deep deep down there under all the confusion he was there – my Dad. There were times I thought about his ‘wretched existence’, but it wasn’t ‘wretched’ nor was he just ‘existing’. To me it was that, but the reality was it was just simply that things had changed, that the ways in which we would identify him as being my Dad might be a little more difficult to observe, they might happen less frequently, and there may be a lot of negatives to deal with or sift through but deep down the lighthouse of his being shone brightly - it was just the fog that enveloped him that got worse.
It was the most gut wrenching moment of my life – the interim care home Dad was placed in wasn’t great. My heart was broken as I left him every day. I took solace in the shared experiences of people on this website. We finally got him into a care home in close proximity to where my Mum lived, where the staff were literally angels. He had 3 years in this care home, and believe it or not he was happy. The dementia had fogged his mind, our conversations were largely meaningless, but I would get clear and regular indications of the fact that the essence of my Dad, his fundamental and intrinsic personality was still there.
My Mum and Dad adopted me when I was young. I’m very live to the nature versus nurture debate. There are elements of my personality, of the man I became which I attribute to them and their influence. But there are elements of my personality which I feel are preconditioned or predetermined, anomalies which I don’t recognise as being characteristics of my adoptive parents or things which I inherited from them. These are the things that are effectively hardwired into me. Some are good, some are bad, but the one thing is that they largely haven’t been able to be eroded by external childhood or lifestyle influences. I believe them to be my very essence.
In the same way as I believe that childhood conditioning cannot change some of the core components of who we are, so I believe there are some indelible elements of who we are that cannot be destroyed by the brutality of dementia. This is purely my subjective view, there are some people that talk about the unrecognisable nature of their loved ones and that is such a challenging position to be in. My encouragement would be to always search for the ‘glimmer’ and when it comes enjoy the fleeting moment. To people at the start of this journey, my advice would be to spot the things that are familiar, cling onto them, it could be a smile, a wink, or something they say.
Lots of people think and say that because Dad had dementia when he passed away last week was ‘a blessing’ or ‘its for the best’. These are well intentioned comments from people trying to be kind, and I would never admonish them – BUT my Dad had the capacity to be happy until the day he died. He was wheel chair bound, he couldn’t have solid food, he was incontinent, he had lost all sense of reason, but when I put Dads Army on the TV he would cry with laughter. He would pull faces, he would make jokes. Deep deep down there under all the confusion he was there – my Dad. There were times I thought about his ‘wretched existence’, but it wasn’t ‘wretched’ nor was he just ‘existing’. To me it was that, but the reality was it was just simply that things had changed, that the ways in which we would identify him as being my Dad might be a little more difficult to observe, they might happen less frequently, and there may be a lot of negatives to deal with or sift through but deep down the lighthouse of his being shone brightly - it was just the fog that enveloped him that got worse.