Ah dementia. Word of the year for 2011. A condition on the rise with any number of battles with a reluctant NHS up ahead. I’ve known at least two people who have ended their days in the grips of this mind thinner. It’s a condition that has no cure, that cannot be fixed, that cannot be made better. The mind wears away, its edges fray, its central parts rub thin like overused shoes. The memories flake off and float away. The ability to move from A to B becomes compromised. The familiar is no longer familiar.
Things get worse in stages, like descending steps. There are plateaus of calm but nothing ever climbs back up. Eventually it all goes on down. The drugs the NHS reluctantly prescribes, reluctant because they are deemed too expensive, can help. They can reduce dementia’s advance and slow its progress. But this condition cannot ultimately be stopped.
My mother carried the names of things she couldn’t remember around with her on scraps of paper in her pockets and in her purse. When she pulled them out she wondered what they were for. Who put these here, she’d ask? You did, I’d say. I did not. Why would I do that?
Yesterday I couldn’t remember the name of the pub built onto the restored pilot house in Cardiff Bay. Leave the Millennium Centre and turn left instead of right. Sam Smith’s Brewery. Like the Tardis once you got inside. What was it called? I just couldn’t recall. Today I still can’t. The name has become erased. Gone off into a set of brain cells which have had their ends taped up. It’s not the Eli Jenkins nor the White Hart. It’s The Waterguard. I’ve just looked it up.
Should I be worried? Not with Google at my side.
Mike, when he was in the teeth of it, would sit in the pub watching his beer evaporate. What do I do with this glass of brown stuff, he might have been thinking, who knows. But after we’d somehow persuaded him to drink a bit and the alcohol began to flow in his veins he’d brighten up. He’d become chatty, remember who he was and who we were. Told the odd joke. Smiled. Almost the man he once was. For Mike alcohol helped.
Dementia – Alzheimer’s –it’s a process, it’s a condition of our post-modern world.
Here’s the poem:
The Voyage of Dementia
The voyage of discovery
The victim of disaster
The volume of dissonance
The vileness of dementia
The discovery of shelter
The death of simplicity
The dissonance of decisions
The disaster of democracy
The viciousness of critics
The volume of criticism
The voyage of creation
The vision of cremation
The dimness of vicissitude
The demonstrability of volume
The debility of ventilation
The death of vision
The fracture of the future
The firmness of dissonance
The fullness of digression
The filibustering of death
The criticism of creation
The commuting of conquest
The consolation of commutation
The cessation of courage
The diagram of depth
The digitisation of drumming
The disregard of dignity
The dimness of diplomacy
The directness of the dharma
The diagnosis of devaluation
The desperation of death
The dementia of denouement
The denouement of dementia.
