My dad suffered instant dementia after brain surgery. Before surgery, he was Dad, insatiable intellect in tact but getting fuzzy from fluid build up behind scar tissue left by a World War II brain injury. After surgery, I never knew which Dad I would find, when I visited him. He could be a man running for president one day; he could be a guest director on Lawrence Welk the next. In order to help him cope, I had to get into his world and run with whatever he thought was going on (I’ll save the details of this controversial process for another article).
Except for a very rare moment where my “real dad” suddenly fought his way through the demented territory of his mind, my dad needed total care, mentally and physically.
On the other hand, my mother’s dementia descended gradually and she was a champ at covering it up, so it was harder to spot. But Mom was easily taken in by phone calls offering “deals,” and I once had to cancel over $1000 worth of magazines that would have been coming until she was over a century old. We decided (with much pressure from my end) that she no longer should keep a credit card. I needed to help them both in the bathroom. I needed to take them wherever they went. These and many other examples would make many people think I was parenting my parents.
But my parents were my parents. That is a fact of life that no illness could change. I never felt otherwise. I was their daughter. They took care of me when I was young. They were there to support me through difficult times in my young adulthood. They were terrific grandparents to my children. They were intelligent, funny, experienced adults. None of that history was wiped away when I, as primary caregiver, had to take over the decision making process during their decline.
I tried to be aware of the losses they felt as their bodies and minds betrayed them (I know I sometimes failed – that, too is for another article). I tried to be sensitive to the fact that they had few real choices they could make, and allow those choices whenever possible. I tried to be as tactful as possible when there was no other choice but to curtail some of their freedoms.