Attribution: Andreas Bohnenstengel, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, listened as the keeper and Phyllis hosted Phyllis’s granddaughter Taylor and friends Ann and Jason in an afternoon of conversation that covered the typical medical/insurance/response issues and then lingered over the mixed-age group on the obligatory subject of dementia.
Personal memory failings were reviewed with head-nodding acknowledgement and the talk turned to absent elderly family members and acquaintances who are on the big “down” dementia escalator.
These conversations unfailingly go to site examples of uncharacteristic behavior in a loved one, and then there are pauses to consider the likelihood of such a thing happening to you, turning your inevitable departure into a long session of inconvenient absurdity.
Dementia in its official wrap of Alzheimer’s has become the epidemic of a culture that now commonly lives long enough to get it.
So, the afternoon visit moved on, not to politics with its mine-field risks, but to the weather where there was blanket agreement that we didn’t need any more of those scorching hot days of several weeks ago. We can remember them.
Damn, we can remember scorching hot days from 75 years ago!
Take that, dementia!
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