Living with Dementia

What happens when a relationship breaks down?

I’m not talking about a man and woman love relationship, I’m talking about within your family, within everyone’s family, some kind of feud large or small will break out sometime or another. But what happens when the reason is illness, illnesses such as dementia. How do you handle it? You watch your family being pushed to their limits, stressed out by the incessant demands of a grandmother/mother you once relied on. You sit round the dinner table and attempt to make pleasant conversation but the strains soon show and you resort to silence, occasionally snapping at each other to break the quiet. You lie in bed listening, listening to the constant shouts, demands for attention, you can’t sleep but neither can they. You lose all respect for a person once sane and independent who has now become a stranger. Walking round the house you hear sobbing from the dining room, whimpers to be taken home and accusations of nastiness echo throughout the house. You try your best to be kind and caring, to put up with the ridiculous unfair notions which are put upon you. But what do you do when your patience wears thin? How do you keep your temper? How do you separate the slightly selfish but sound person you once knew from the growling, disillusioned person who throws her walking stick at you? 

You feel like such a bad person, the relationship you once shared has evaporated. No one knows where it can have gone. But it is gone nonetheless. There is no relationship, only a burden remains, a burden you are obliged to carry due the biological relationship you share. Yet the meaning has gone from their eyes, and it begins to leave yours.

You have to remember the good times, remember them for who they were, but when they weren’t brilliant in the first place it makes it even harder. Especially when the behaviour of the person with dementia calls into question the strengths of other relationships, husband and wife, brother and sister, the cracks inevitably appear. All coping in different ways… ignoring it, putting up with it, trying to change it, but none provide any release. Not for us. Not for her, especially not for her, living with dementia, hardly living at all.

When all that is left of the relationship is the ‘relation’ part i.e. she is still your mother/grandmother, but the ‘ship’ has gone, that connection gone.

 

I am aware of the somewhat depressing tone of this article and being an optimist to the core I would like to say that despite all of the above, there were good times, there are good times and there will always be good times. Not just for us, for everybody. The best advise I can give, not that I’m an expert, is to treasure any relationship you when you have it, when its lost remember what you treasured, and most importantly that, although unconditional love is hard to find, its out there somewhere, and even an attempt to find it is surely the most worthy thing of all in any relationship, dementia or not?

 

Sarah Duley