Crow… the language as dementia tightens its grip

In 2014 I lost my mother to cancer. It was a bitter and painful death. I was left heartbroken by the shape it took. She was jagged, angry. I begged for kindness. I thought I would be stronger than I was. I thought she would be kinder. I thought that the script would play out with me by her bedside: mother and daughter united in mutual love, gentle words spoken, longed for apologies made. But words failed us. I can see that now.

By 2017 I was witnessing my father in a different, slower kind of death and my heart was breaking all over again. Vascular dementia was robbing him of mobility and everyday tasks confused him. For example, a phone call answered was a revelation to him, because a call unanswered means, to him, a technical failure. So, he rings and rings and rings again to see if the failure is there or not. One Tuesday, I had ten calls from him by 7.15am.

I was able to cope, just about, with the inexorable decline in his mobility. A limp that turned into a shuffle, that turned into a fall. When his body became wheelchair bound, his head still thought he could walk. I got regular calls from the rest home with news of the latest fall in his room.

The man who regaled all with tall stories and dirty jokes is being reduced to a sound more birdlike than human: the caw-caw- caw of a crow.

But then suddenly, swiftly like a bird in flight, he lost much of the gift of language and I found this terrifying. The man who regaled all with tall stories and dirty jokes is being reduced to a sound more birdlike than human: the caw-caw-caw of a crow. Just two weeks before, we were discussing politics, yet suddenly I could only catch the occasional word, but I could tell that he knew exactly what he wanted to tell me. I could see it in his eye. I tried to string his corvid sounds together in the hope of constructing some sort of appropriate response.

This loss of language is a like a nightmare. One of those ones where you are locked in a room and no one can hear your screams for release. Or the dream where you are invisible in the street and whatever you do, no one seems to see you. My father was being robbed of language and I could see him descending into that nightmare. He talked but no one can hear. And no, writing things down is not an option. The act of using a pen confused him.

One day, on the 9th phone call, I did manage to catch enough to realise he told me he misses me.

At this point in his dementia journey I could see that soon all he would have is hearing and touch and the ability to give and receive energy. Like my mother in her last days. But I so wanted his to be a different sort of death, a better sort of energy. I wanted to try to reduce his fear. I wanted to do all the things for him that I could not do for my mum. He let me help. He let me tell him I love him. I could feel that he was scared. Or is it me? Isolation grew with each drip, drip, drip of blood into his brain. He knew enough to know it was all going horribly wrong.

I remember finding it hard to deal with a world in which my father still lived, but could not tell his stories anymore. His words had failed him. I sat by him and held his hand. I told him a story. Outside his window I could see a bird in a tree. Singing.