Just got absolutely destroyed by opening a book and finding a letter my Dad wrote shortly after the family suddenly found out about my Grandpa Bert’s dementia, when my Grandmother died in 1997.

She’d been covering for Grandpa Bert for a long time.

The letter very sensibly says Dad doesn’t want to leave us in that sort of mess, and sets out some funeral instructions.

Which are almost what he asked for when I spent most of a week helping Mum and Dad write their Advanced Care Plans in 2019. Except he’d forgotten the songs he loved and asked for in the 1997 letter.

Now Dad has dementia, and my heart is broken. The hardest sentence was “I could just get old and change from being difficult to manage to impossible.”

Oh, Dad.

#Dementia #DementiaSux #Mum
#Dad #AdvancedCarePlanning #AdvancedCarePlan #AgeingParents

@Wonderdog I'm so sorry to hear that. It really is a scourge. It completely strips a person of their essence. The Motherator hung in there for a long time - too long really - and in 2019 (thankfully just before COVID changed everything), and this most gentle of men began violently physically attacking her, he went into care. I hope your mum doesn't wait as long as mine did and I hope your dad is ok and doesn't suffer for too long. The widow analagy is most apt, sadly :( #dementia #dementiasux

Managed to convince Mum and Dad in Adelaide not to go to their church carols service tonight, but to stream it instead.

“It’s not the same. I hate this,” said Mum.

“I know, Mum. I’m sorry. But you said yourself, it’s a high Covid period. And it’s people your age, and immunocompromised people like your son who are most likely to get sick. And you want to be together for Christmas…”

“But I hate my voice. If it was outside, I’d go, but it’s too hot.”

Dad, meanwhile, was having a bad day, and had got stuck on something I’d mentioned earlier. I made a banana cake which needed four ripe bananas, and Dad was focused on getting extra bananas, even though they weren’t needed. He wouldn’t be diverted, even with trying to take him back to childhood memories (which often works.)

#COVID19 #covid #dementia #DementiaSux #ChristmasCarols #Mum #Dad

@MsPraxis I’m so sorry to hear about your stepdad, Prax.

My Dad has vascular dementia, and was diagnosed last December.

It’s progressing pretty quickly. It’s hardest on Mum - she’s coping pretty much on her own, and says he doesn’t mean to be difficult, but is finding breaks with routine more anxiety inducing, and when that happens, he doesn’t sleep, and he gets confused.

It sounds to me like for her it’s like being a widow and looking after a toddler, all at once, while still living with her husband sometimes.

#dementia #DementiaSux