I am sad because my husband of 51 years is leaving me by inches day after day. I've had counselling for depression which helped a great deal.
The thing that no-one seems to talk about on these pages is how boring it is being a carer.
Having had a very busy life with 4 children, always working full-time, and lots of activities like amateur dramatics and being a Borough and County Councillor (more dramatics!), life is now reduced to a part-time job that I'm clinging onto for dear life as it gets me out of the house and mixing with 'normal' people.
When I come home it's to a barrage of paranoia (someone's been in the house and stolen his clothes), a demand to be taken to the local shops even though there's nothing we need, watching him fall asleep in front of the TV and wake up confused and aggressive.
We went to a dinner recently with old friends, a group of over 35 people, and I was having a good time, but before the main course my husband insisted on leaving as it was 'too much' for him.
When we eat out on our own, we used to find it strange that other couples sat in silence when we always had so much to say to each other. Now he says very little, and I have to work hard to avoid us sitting there in silence. He occasionally starts a sentence but doesn't get far with it and I have to try and guess where it was going.
He can't manage the garden any longer and tries to do a bit of DIY which usually ends with him trying to stick things together with Savlon or Ibruprofen gel and getting very angry with me when I try to understand why it won't work.
Yesterday he moved a lot of stuff I had put in a spare bedroom to take to the charity shop, but denied having done so. Took me ages to find some of the things in the most obscure hiding places, some things haven't turned up yet.
It's like living with a toddler in an adult body, but the difference is that toddlers learn and develop but people with dementia just get worse. Sounds really trivial, but I tell him daily not to put stuff in the bins outside, and every day I go out and find recycling in the garden waste bin, unrecyclable waste in the recycling bin. Every bin day I have to don rubber gloves, empty all the bins and reallocate the waste.
When I see my children and other people I have to bite my tongue not to moan about him, they don't want to hear it and it's occasionally funny but usually pretty dull. I don't want to be that person who talks about nothing else (like so many older people just talk about their ailments), but as we have next to no social life these days there are limits to what I can talk about and what I'm looking forward to. So I try to be a good listener these days, and if people ask about my husband I keep my answers brief and light, because I don't want to be a person that everyone avoids because I'm just a moaning minnie.
That's what's helpful about these forums - you are allowed to moan and everyone else understand the need to vent.