The Tao of Dementia
Granny has dementia. She doesn't remember much from minute to minute, much less from day to day. But she doesn't realise this, she cannot remember that that she doesn't remember. She lives in the eternal present and the distant past, which thankfully she can remember, in parts. When she tells you a story it will be told in exactly the same way as she told you the same story five minutes previously, or yesterday, or last week, or last year, even tomorrow it will have just occurred to her to tell it, and every time for the first time.
She has a routine, which daily she remembers what to do and when. She is aware that she has had a meal or not, whether she has had a cup of tea in the afternoon or that she has had a mid-morning cup of coffee. She knows on a thursday she goes to town, she knows on a sunday we'll usually go out to the pub for lunch.
She's slightly incontinent, and it upsets her, but only when she is changing - it has never happened before and it will not happen again. She still paints, she says, but she leaves the her painting equipment on the dining room table, all laid out as though she had been using it just yesterday. She hasn't touched it for weeks, but it is there, so she feels that she is keeping busy.
Yesterday she returned from the day centre with a raffle prize of five chocolate bars. She gave one to me. When I came downstairs an hour or so later there was only one left. I asked where the others were but she thought the one there was mine and had had nothing to do with her in the first place. She had no memory of getting the chocolate, eating the chocolate or throwing the wrappers in the bin. She told me she wouldn't want much supper because she'd had a good lunch at the day centre - she always tells me she has a good lunch there, it is all she can remember of her day. If I ask her what else she's been doing there she says, 'oh, just the usual, lots of sitting about.'
I've lived with her for nearly three years now. She's 90 and I'm 34. We live in a small town in the south west of England, a nice enough place but a long way from anywhere, the kind of town people like to retire to because they are scared of the big wide world, or the kind of place people grow up and stay in because they were brought up being scared of the big wide world.
There was a headline in the local paper during the recent conflict in Lebanon...
"Invasion!"
... but the article was about Japanese Knotweed moving into some local hedgerows.
It's that kind of a place, the big wide world is the big wide world, but it doesn't exist here and when it pulls into town the locals don't like it.
I love my Granny. She's barking mad, to coin a phrase, but at the same time she's more in tune with herself than a lot of people seem to be. She knows yet she cannot remember.
If you know anything of the Tao you'll know that the Tao that can be followed is not the true Tao.
If you didn't you do now. Dementia is a state of mind. Coping with dementia is a state of mind.
And, we must remember if we can, that the name that can be named is not the eternal name.
