Living with Dementia since I was 8 years old…

***One blow to his head changed our world forever and the Air Force covered it up…***

One thing about the memory journey, when I do look back at the past, which is something I really don’t do, I remember way too much and it gets overwhelming when it all shows up, like I am watching a VHS while it’s fast forwarding at 2 times the normal speed…

That’s how it works for me… I get flooded and like right now, my head starts to hurt and then my jaw… but I digress…

When Don got hit with the softball as he umpired, it knocked him out cold and Freda loved to tell the story how Don shit his pants and they had to throw his underware away, etc….

That time line has been a real drudge for me to get straight… Seems that’s what my night time has been doing with the long term memory… connecting the train cars, so it’s consecutive and not a engine in the middle of the memory….

We had just moved to Alabama… Don hadn’t been to the Bay of Pigs yet and the boob incident hadn’t happened yet… and I loved going with my daddy to his part time jobs that were out doors…

We already had me and my younger sis and bro came along and then another bro… Then the softball injury to Don’s brain happened and everything in our world changed…

I do often wonder if my mother was highly intelligent or just manipulative and I have to go with manipulative, because she struggled with banking, finances and other things… Which explains how a $100,000 disappeared before she died… Anyhow…

When the Softball incident happened, all of a sudden, within weeks, Don was walking the halls at night and Freda, being a light sleeper was usually following behind and turning off the lights that he would turn on… then we take a trip to Bonita….

Don gets off work from umpire job, he already did his military job and it was a long weekend and I am really pretty sure my brother Larry was with us for the summer or maybe living with us, not sure on that…

But we all load up in that Belair and take off to go see granny… About half way there and Don is sleepy, we pull over and me and big bro go with Don to the picinic table and crash out, Freda and the little ones, slept in the car… and the next thing… we are driving down the road in the dead of night, I wake up and bro looks at me and we both look at Freda an her eyes wide she says…

SHHHH

Your dad is asleep at the wheel… I think that was the trip where BillyRay cut his hand on Unlce Dan’s circle saw in the barn on the farm… That’s about as much of that I have been able to piece together…

Don’s dementia started that summer I was 8 years old and the Sundowner’s would be diagnoised in 2005, a year before he died and I knew as a kid what he had… How???

Good question, one, even the neurologist can’t answer… except by saying you have a high IQ and high tolerance to pain, yada, yada, yada….

Yea, IQ is only as good as your knowledge and what I know, could fit in a boot… My short term memory is real real bad… quitting the pot soon might improve that, we will see… Homer finally agreed to try quitting…

Anyhow… Watching Homer’s dementia is why the write…

I had him move the sign for the 5th wheel and every thing turned into him not hearing or listening and his placement of the sign made zero sense and I had to point that out this morning and for once, he didn’t argue, he listened and tried to figure out where he screwed up…

The placement for the flyers and sign have to be on the edge of the property, so no one has to get out of their vehicles to take a flyer… Down here, putting private property signs up isn’t the norm and we have them, only because of the dogs and I don’t want solicitors bothering me, especially the cross pushers…

Letting Homer know of the mistakes he made without making it a big deal, but a moment in, look, reason, logic and solve and with dementia… That’s like taking a square peg and putting it in a round hole… Once they can no longer figure that out, we are going into the next stage of the disease…

With my dad, I watched as his world change from a easy and laid back man, into a violent and cruel human, only because… He was manipulated…

I could easily do that to Homer, but our relationship is built on trust and respect and cruelty and manipulation has never entered our door… I believe in freedom of the mind till that freedom becomes a danger to it’s self or others…

As a caregiver and a wife… I have a daily tightrope I walk… Sometimes I fall off it and make mistakes… I learn from those and strive not to repeat… Homer’s world is closing in on him and I am pushing him to force those grey cells to look for alternatives, to buy him time for science to make it better…

I remember…