Living With Dementia

Miilia Maria Kotiilia Kananen was my grandmother on my dad’s side. She was born in 1913 to Johannes and Briita Kananen, immigrants who left Finland in 1908 when it was still part of the Russian Empire. She grew up in Williamsfield, OH (on the Pennsylvania state line), and in 1935 she married my grandfather, Vaughn Arnold. They had a farm a little further west, in Hunstburg, and raised corn, cattle, and then chickens.

She spent her life as a tough farm woman. She loved plants and had a greenhouse attached to the house. She would find toads in the yard and bring them into the greenhouse, and would frequently pick them up and talk to them – and they would chirp back to her!

She was 92 when my grandfather passed in 2005. It became clear pretty quickly that she had had dementia for some time, and that he had been covering for her. We found she would leave windows open around the house, and then become angry because someone was leaving windows open around the house! Laundry would pile up in the corners (keep in mind she had always been very particular about keeping a clean house) and blamed it on women that floated in the air and dropped it through doors in the ceiling.

We had her in a nursing home for a while but this became too expensive and we brought her home to live with us. Everything was going about as well as could be expected for a time, but it is a characteristic of Alzheimer’s Type Dementia that the victim regresses, thinking themselves younger and younger, and there came a day when Grandma was once again a rebellious sixteen-year old and we couldn’t manage her any longer.

She eventually passed, in 2008, and while she was needing a lot of care at the time, was not as far gone as some people I’ve had the privilege of looking after. I’ve done a lot of work in nursing homes, and I’ve had a fair number of my patients progress to the point that they even forget how to eat. You could give them a fork and they would look at it, mystified, before picking up their food with their fingers.

Dementia is a heartbreak. The longer it goes on the worse the heartbreak gets. People become as little children, and need all the care and safeguarding that a toddler does. This is our responsibility as those who are still possessed of our faculties. It is a responsibility we owe to those who made sacrifices on our behalf, both individually and as a society, and one I take very seriously.