... Hi. I've never posted on anything like this before and I don't really talk about the things that are making me want to post now with other people. Mostly because there isn't anybody to talk about them with. None of my friends understand what I'm going through, and my family have their own perspectives, and that can obscure my ability to grieve through my own sometimes.
I'm 24, my father is 73, and he suffers from senile dementia. It's gotten progressively worse in the past year or two. At the moment, he's at the stage where he can't remember what day/month/year it is, where I live, or what we just did. He's beginning to enter the agitated, uncomfortable, infuriated stage. He lives with my mother, who is 55, in a rural part of southern ireland. I live in the UK, and am essentially their ownly child (I say essentially, my father has two sons - my half brothers - who are both in their 40s, but neither are close, and a recent email from me asking them for support met with silence from one and anger from the other). Family in Ireland is not supportive, family in the UK is, but it's not much use.
In addition to his dementia, I believe my father also suffers from aspergers. This has never been clinically diagnosed, but I am convinced this is an aspect of his mental health for reasons too lengthy and complicated to justify here. He is also largely illiterate and inumerate.
I've just got home from a family gathering (in the UK, my parents were visiting) where I had to look after my dad for a few hours on my own so that my mother and her family could have some time together. Her mother, my gran, passed away two months ago, so it is a difficult time for her. She also left her full time job, a real vocation-type job that she loved, just before Christmas in order to care for my dad.
I work in a high pressure job. I don't have a partner. I'm relatively new to the town I live in and don't have a large social network.
At the moment, I'm finding it hard to cope and I can only see things getting harder. I'm feeling this horrible mixture of fear and anger and dispair, and all I can think about are funerals or horrible old people's homes with plastic chairs and orange walls. I'm petrified that something's going to happen to my mother. I'm absolutely scared to my core that she's going to die.
I get lumps in my throat whenever I think about how unfair and upside down it all is. My father's never been much good at fathering, although i know he loves me endlessly. And I feel cheated that I never had a dad who could look after me in the ways a dad's supposed to, as well as cheated that he's now disintegrating, and that he requires so much attention and care from my mother, attention and care that I want, and that makes me feel jealous and frustrated but above all guilty, because I know he's incapable of doing anything about it or even recognising it, and that it must break my mother's heart so much to be torn in two in such an awful way. I feel guilty that I can't be just nice to him, that I get cross sometimes... Even though i'm so much better at dealing with him now than I was when I was younger.
He's always been an incredibly unique character, and that hasn't diminished, he's always been the way he is now, except now he's more forgetful/absent-minded/confused/unable to sustain a conversation or learn anything new. He's always been able to just switch off to things, and he does that a lot more often these days. But the thing that really struck me today as the thing he's losing most - the thing that has always defined his character more than anything else, the thing other people remember and love him for, the thing that I will always remember him for - is his nature. He's the happiest, most self-contented person I've ever met. He has this crazy ability to simply refuse to be sad, or moan, or be negative or depressed. He absolutely refuses to be angry or cross - to the extent that he leaves the room when Eastenders is on because "it's too violent" and he can't handle the loud voices/shouting, which he perceives as agression. And so he'll go off and do something else and automatically switch back into his cheery, contented self. And that's what, today, I realised was starting to go. He's not contented. He's agitated. He's not comfortable. He's sad. He feels left out. He feels badgered and instructed. He hates that people tell him what to do, and hates the fact that he doesn't know what to do just as much. We went for a bike ride today and I had to repeat about six times that we were turning right at the end of the road, and when we got to the junction I shouted "Right!!" really loud, and he stopped because he was distressed that I'd shouted at him, and still wasn't sure he had to turn right. He's starting not to trust people. He's starting to shut down. My mother is the only person he's comfortable around and he can't bear to be away from her side, even when he's with me, and he's constantly on edge until he's near her. Then he glues himself to her like a clingy toddler. She can't go anywhere.
It's so difficult and ugly to watch, and so much worse to be a part of. I don't know how I'm feeling or how to get my head around it... I'm so confused that I just cry but I can't pinpoint any one specific emotion, or one reason in my head as to why. I can't break it down. I don't know anybody my age going through this. Most of the time it's older people losing their partners, or people my mum's age losing their parents. But rarely people my mum's age losing their partner, and even more rarely people my age losing their daddies. I don't know where to turn or what to think or feel or do. I don't even know why I'm writing this or why I'm about to push the post button. I feel like I'm putting a message in a bottle and corking it and throwing it out into the sea and going back on to my lonely little island to sit and wait for something to happen or for a message to come back with all the answers or maybe even for someone to find me and tell me that it's going to be ok and that I'll get through it and make me really believe it.
If you've taken the time to read this, thanks, and if you've got something to say then please say it. I need to hear anything right now.
Hannah
I'm 24, my father is 73, and he suffers from senile dementia. It's gotten progressively worse in the past year or two. At the moment, he's at the stage where he can't remember what day/month/year it is, where I live, or what we just did. He's beginning to enter the agitated, uncomfortable, infuriated stage. He lives with my mother, who is 55, in a rural part of southern ireland. I live in the UK, and am essentially their ownly child (I say essentially, my father has two sons - my half brothers - who are both in their 40s, but neither are close, and a recent email from me asking them for support met with silence from one and anger from the other). Family in Ireland is not supportive, family in the UK is, but it's not much use.
In addition to his dementia, I believe my father also suffers from aspergers. This has never been clinically diagnosed, but I am convinced this is an aspect of his mental health for reasons too lengthy and complicated to justify here. He is also largely illiterate and inumerate.
I've just got home from a family gathering (in the UK, my parents were visiting) where I had to look after my dad for a few hours on my own so that my mother and her family could have some time together. Her mother, my gran, passed away two months ago, so it is a difficult time for her. She also left her full time job, a real vocation-type job that she loved, just before Christmas in order to care for my dad.
I work in a high pressure job. I don't have a partner. I'm relatively new to the town I live in and don't have a large social network.
At the moment, I'm finding it hard to cope and I can only see things getting harder. I'm feeling this horrible mixture of fear and anger and dispair, and all I can think about are funerals or horrible old people's homes with plastic chairs and orange walls. I'm petrified that something's going to happen to my mother. I'm absolutely scared to my core that she's going to die.
I get lumps in my throat whenever I think about how unfair and upside down it all is. My father's never been much good at fathering, although i know he loves me endlessly. And I feel cheated that I never had a dad who could look after me in the ways a dad's supposed to, as well as cheated that he's now disintegrating, and that he requires so much attention and care from my mother, attention and care that I want, and that makes me feel jealous and frustrated but above all guilty, because I know he's incapable of doing anything about it or even recognising it, and that it must break my mother's heart so much to be torn in two in such an awful way. I feel guilty that I can't be just nice to him, that I get cross sometimes... Even though i'm so much better at dealing with him now than I was when I was younger.
He's always been an incredibly unique character, and that hasn't diminished, he's always been the way he is now, except now he's more forgetful/absent-minded/confused/unable to sustain a conversation or learn anything new. He's always been able to just switch off to things, and he does that a lot more often these days. But the thing that really struck me today as the thing he's losing most - the thing that has always defined his character more than anything else, the thing other people remember and love him for, the thing that I will always remember him for - is his nature. He's the happiest, most self-contented person I've ever met. He has this crazy ability to simply refuse to be sad, or moan, or be negative or depressed. He absolutely refuses to be angry or cross - to the extent that he leaves the room when Eastenders is on because "it's too violent" and he can't handle the loud voices/shouting, which he perceives as agression. And so he'll go off and do something else and automatically switch back into his cheery, contented self. And that's what, today, I realised was starting to go. He's not contented. He's agitated. He's not comfortable. He's sad. He feels left out. He feels badgered and instructed. He hates that people tell him what to do, and hates the fact that he doesn't know what to do just as much. We went for a bike ride today and I had to repeat about six times that we were turning right at the end of the road, and when we got to the junction I shouted "Right!!" really loud, and he stopped because he was distressed that I'd shouted at him, and still wasn't sure he had to turn right. He's starting not to trust people. He's starting to shut down. My mother is the only person he's comfortable around and he can't bear to be away from her side, even when he's with me, and he's constantly on edge until he's near her. Then he glues himself to her like a clingy toddler. She can't go anywhere.
It's so difficult and ugly to watch, and so much worse to be a part of. I don't know how I'm feeling or how to get my head around it... I'm so confused that I just cry but I can't pinpoint any one specific emotion, or one reason in my head as to why. I can't break it down. I don't know anybody my age going through this. Most of the time it's older people losing their partners, or people my mum's age losing their parents. But rarely people my mum's age losing their partner, and even more rarely people my age losing their daddies. I don't know where to turn or what to think or feel or do. I don't even know why I'm writing this or why I'm about to push the post button. I feel like I'm putting a message in a bottle and corking it and throwing it out into the sea and going back on to my lonely little island to sit and wait for something to happen or for a message to come back with all the answers or maybe even for someone to find me and tell me that it's going to be ok and that I'll get through it and make me really believe it.
If you've taken the time to read this, thanks, and if you've got something to say then please say it. I need to hear anything right now.
Hannah
