This is kind of a vent thing for me, really, so pardon my wordiness. I don't really write about memory loss (specifically, dementia), b/c it hits too close to home for me. I don't really want to include that as a motif in any of my stories, b/c I've had to deal with someone in my family who has it for ten years now.
The thing about memory loss and depression is that depression isn't exactly sadness, I think. No, it actually stems from internalized anger from having to keep your emotions bottled up (stiff upper lip and all that), b/c you're never allowed to vent you anger under normal circumstances, so really, depression is anger spread thin. How this relates to memory loss (dementia and specifically aphasia) is through the loss of you ability to control your emotions. That's usually the first thing that goes (your ability to control your emotions) with the onset of possible dementia if it's left unaddressed. Bottle up you emotions long enough, and everything that could get to you will get to you, and you find yourself more and more often snapping at people all the time for little annoyances that won't affect most people too much or for too long. Once that becomes a habit, you need some way to create an outlet to relieve the bottled-up anger/stress, and porn is one of them, and so is drinking, and so is doing drugs. Do that long enough, and you start losing the ability to sleep normally: that's when it really starts.
Case in point, my dad. He used to be a chef for over 40 years, and the hours he would put in are insane, which affected his sleep, his mood, his drinking, and eventually his marital life. I remember when I was a kid and into my teen and college years that my parents would fight once or twice a month, sometimes a few times a week, and this was during my time in college. It was horrible living through that, and so I picked up writing while I was in high school and college as a way to help me to vent through writing, mostly poetry and later fanfiction as a way to lose myself for a time. That's how I became I writer, but anyway, back to my dad.
I started noticing back near the end of 2015 that he would steal things, mostly small things like pens, tape, bags of nuts, etc., but it all came to a head when he got caught shoplifting lightbulbs on New Year's Eve, so our New Year's was pretty much shot at that point. I won't say how much we had to pay to setting things out of court, but it was a lot of money. He was later diagnosed with dementia (specifically, aphasia, which affect the front part of the brain that deals with controlling emotions), and that's when the fighting between my parents and became much worse and much much more frequent. Man, 2017 to 2019 were the toughest years for me, mentally and emotionally, because that's when I saw a sharp decline in my dad's mental faculties. Besides an increase fights between my parents up to late summer of 2017, I could still handle it, but August 2017 proved to be the tipping point.
I won't go into too much detail: just know that my father got lost for three days while riding his bicycle outside, and those three days were the longest days of my life. My mom and I and all our friends and neighbors went looking for him in the city, and we talked with the police, and they sent out a silver alert on TV, and we found him seven miles away from the house. He was actually go back towards our house when police found him, and we had to get him checked out by the doctor. That's another facet about dementia: losing your ability to recognize landmarks. Long story short, he couldn't drive anymore, and he had to go to an adult daycare, which helped us a ton up to the spring of 2019. Then our luck ran out, b/c he got angry so easy and couldn't control his emotions, so the daycare could take care of him anymore. Then I had to look after him all day, forcing me to switch my writing time from the daytime to the nighttime, which worked out, but even that wouldn't last. In June of 2019, I was with my parents going out to eat, and my mom was driving, and my dad was due to come back to the daycare the day afterward after spending a month away. That's when some asshole made an illegal left turn and hit our car, and my mom got injured. She had to go to the hospital, and since the car was towed, my dad and I had to take a cab to the house before I drove us to the hospital. Long story short, this complicated my dad's return to the daycare when I took him there, for them to take care of him, so I could visit my mom, but barely and hour passes by when the daycare calls and asks me to pick him up, because they couldn't handle my dad's anger issues, so I had to take him back and take him with me to the hospital to visit my mom. Long story short, my mom was injured to two places (her back and her foot), so doctors had to treat her back first before they treated her foot, but that just made things much worse. Things that should've been fixed immediately didn't get fixed and thus never healed correctly, so she walks with a limp now. Anyway, I know this is hella long-winded, but all that time, I was having to balance taking care of my mom (who tried her best to relieve as much of the burden on my shoulders as possible) and look after my dad, who had worsening dementia. All of this merged into 2020 and the COVID pandemic everything, and all the extended isolation just made things worse. Looking back on it now, I often wonder just how I was able to even handle all of that, b/c everything that could've happen to screw us over DID happen; in fact, the only that we were spared from during that time was the COVID virus, thank God!
Man, you won't believe the amount of emotional turmoil I had to go through during that time. I'm actually talking to a therapist to cope with all of this, but anyway, all this social isolation, all this stress, everything made my dad's dementia worse, and right now it's progressed to the point where my dad can't say our names anymore. That's another facet of dementia: losing your ability to communicate with words. He can still recognize our faces, and he can still say a few words, but I know it's incurable and progressive (as in, it only gets worse), so I can only prepare myself for how bad it's going to get.
Anyway, it's been 10 years since my dad showed his first symptoms, and seeing him decline like that is heart-breaking, but all you can really do is love and cherish what you have for the time you have them. Anyway, that's it.
