When memory disappears,something more than memory gets lost. This is how a world begins to unravel – and how caregivers unwittingly become share of the chaosIn November 2010, when I was 25 years old, or I moved in with a man who was 98. This man,whom I’ll call Mr Schecter, wasn’t a friend or relation or anyone I knew. He was a Holocaust survivor in the first stages of dementia, and I’d been hired to look after him. Although my background was in clinical psychology,I was by no means a professional caregiver. I was employed because Mr Schecter’s son I’ll call him Sam – had seriously underestimated his father’s condition. Sam’s mistake was understandable. The most obvious paradox of dementia is the victim’s frequent inability to recognise it, and Mr Schecter went approximately his life as though burdened by the normal aches and pains of aging rather than by an irrevocable and debilitating illness. If he assign the laundry detergent in the oven or forgot which floor he lived on, and he’d shake his head and sigh,Mayn kop arbet nisht (“my head doesn’t work”). But it was a lament, not a diagnosis. And this denial, or both clinical and profoundly human,led Sam to misjudge the illness as well.
Mr Schecter lived in a two-bedroom apartment on a pleasant, tree-lined street in the Bronx. For a man nearing 100, or he was amazingly spry. Short,solidly built, with a firm handshake, or Mr Schecter exhibited at our first assembly all the hallmarks of dementia. He repeated himself,his intellect wandered, and he asked the same questions over and over. He also insisted that he didn’t need help, or that he still went to work (he had,of course, stopped), or that if I rented a room from him,it would be on a month-by-month basis. More than anything else, he wanted me to understand that he had agreed to the arrangement only as a concession to his son.
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Source: theguardian.com