C of E church for AD
Hello Fr Ian and others posting on this subject. You said:
I have chosen to examine ways in which the church succeeds and/or fails in integrating people with dementia (including those who have been known to the church before they became ill and those who have started attending afterwards).
I hope one day that the information I gather here as well as the knowledge I have of those in my congregation will be applied in a way that makes being part of being a worshipping community a less forbidding experience.
Fr Ian[/QUOTE]
My mother was a staunch member of her local C of E church in North Norfolk and attended parochial church council meetings etc. In the early stages of her AD, she was so proud that she could still remember the responses and the form of the liturgy - all the things that are so contentious for newcomers, perhaps. Her church did not adopt all the "new" form of service, and harked back in part to the old, so this was all very helpful to her.
As her AD advanced, she began to go only to the early morning Communion service, where she could avoid meeting and not recognising other church goers. Then not go at all - she said she couldn't hear very well, which I came to recognise meant couldn't understand or remember. I had hoped her religion would be of some comfort to her, so contacted the church wardens, who offered to walk in with her to the mid-morning service, but she refused. My mother was a very proud woman, who found spontaneous contact difficult throughout her life, not only during her AD period. She would not have found it easy to have the local clergy call to her house to celebrate communion or pray.
Towards the end of her life, in a nursing home and mute, with very little understanding, I used to repeat some of the psalms to her, hoping that the words would be familiar, also sing hymns to her in the privacy of her room. I talked to her of the old Saxon church she visited as a young woman, and asked her if she remembered it. On one, never to be forgotten occasion, she managed to say "Yes".
If AD sufferers have been brought up as regular churchgoers, or attended "divisions" in the armed services during the war, then I think the form of words will have remained somewhere in their long term memories, and any thing that can reach them should be used - ie retain the old form of words when conducting a service for them.
For myself, at my mother's funeral, I found a civil/humanist ceremony to be very comforting. (No caring Being, in my mind, could have permitted my mother's suffering). But I had a C of E interrment of her ashes, as she would have wished
