The Nurture and Nature of Dementia

My dad was supposed to live forever. He has always been my protector, my supporter. Now our roles are reversed. He is the last surviving parent to succumb to the cruel effects of cognitive decline. He is forgetting his words. He is losing his balance. He is losing his ability to organize his life. A year ago, I walked into my childhood home to find every horizontal surface covered with paper – sheets laid out so carefully that maybe he could see the order in the disorder. Dementia has quickly surrounded me from all sides, and I am left defenseless.

When I met my birth parents in 2017 and 2018, they were both in their mid-60s. Because I didn’t know them as people, I couldn’t have known that they were already showing signs of memory loss. Various family members on both sides told me my birth parents presented with cognitive issues in their early 60s. Two years into my reunion, my birth mother and birth father would be formally diagnosed with dementia. They are very different people and lead separate lives. The life sentence of dementia may be the only commonality between them. Well, besides me.

 My birth mother has progressed the quickest. The once boisterous, take-charge person has been reduced to someone who quietly waits for direction. She looks at the world through glazed eyes and cries often as if trying to wash away the fog. My fiercely independent and active birth father now sits in his recliner and reads most days – his car taken away because he struggled to find his way. He is still in there. We still laugh, hike, and ski together. But his bad days are starting to outnumber the good ones. And now… my dad.

There is no cure. There is no hope for the future. Dementia slowly steals your memories and your life. Will my parents remember me? The daughter that always was and was never meant to be? 

Will both nurture and nature be my demise? It is hard not to worry about how this all affects me. I carry one gene variant and the environmental influences of the man who raised me. I am fifty. Do I only have ten years left? I have spent the last sixteen years raising a challenging child with special needs. Now that he is an adult, I have slowly started to reclaim my life. I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. Will that light be extinguished before I arrive?

I sit back and watch the light slowly dim. Colors that were once bright red and orange are now gray. Everything is starting to fade into the background. I think I grew up here. I bend over to grab a fistful of sugary sand, only to watch it quickly slide between my fingers. Our time is almost up. I can’t hold on. I see your outline off in the distance. I can nearly recognize your face. I call out, but you don’t hear me. The light is now gone. Everything has gone dark.