What Dementia Is

My mom has dementia.  She's had it for many years now.  She lives in an assisted-living facility that has a memory-care unit.  It is a nice place, and the people that work there are really wonderful.

I had a conversation the other day with the unit director. I had gone by to visit and drop off a medical form that needed to be dealt with.

The director told me that the staff had been trying to get my mother to take a shower and she was being very uncooperative.  She was in the bathroom calling people names and just generally being very disagreeable (very common with dementia by the way).  The staff asked the director to help, as she has always had a very good relationship with my mother.

So, the director was able to get her into the shower and cleaned up.  Afterwards, she had turned around to grab some towels when my mother started saying, "You bastard.  You son of a bitch.  Look at you!  Who are you?  You are disgusting."

At first the director thought my mom was talking to her.  She looked over and watched as my mother stared at herself in the mirror, calling herself every nasty name in the book.

There she was, looking right in the mirror, and not able to recognize herself.  And that, in a nutshell, is dementia.

Imagine how frightening the world must be to a person who looks in a mirror and sees a stranger.