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Grandparents and Dementia |
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Written by Ross Cavins
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Tuesday, 19 February 2008 |
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  It's a known fact: we all have grandparents or did have them at one time. And sometimes, if those grandparents live long enough, they may suffer from a form of dementia. Forgetting a name, making a peanut butter and tomato sandwich, talking to people not there (including dead people).
If you strip away all the real-life implications of dementia and pretend your grandparents just like to get high all the time, it's pretty funny. Eating cereal drenched in Diet Coke instead of milk could mean that Grandma just has the munchies. Adding a half cup of sugar to the laundry instead of using detergent is cute when Grandpa just smoked a big fatty. Granny talking about sex is no longer embarrassing when she's rolled some X.
 Is that you, Martin?
It was good, a real dinger if you will. We usually waited for my Maw Maw to go home before we got raunchy like that but this time, I'm glad we didn't. I can't remember the joke but the punchline had something to do with an erect penis. My pious little grandmother, my stooped-over slow-walking little granny, the same one that went to church several times a week ... laughed the hardest out of all of us. She laughed so hard I thought she might need oxygen or a new lung.
This same Maw Maw, now twenty years later, is 91 and living in a home. She's my last living grandparent and she has the Dementia. It's so bad that she sometimes doesn't recognize her own children. One of her daughters, Irene, visits regularly and often acts as a buffer between Maw Maw and her visitors.
The Other Day ...My Mom: Hey, Mama Ruth, how are you doing today?
Irene: (to Mama Ruth) Mama, this is Norma Lee. She's here to visit.
Mama Ruth: (to my mom, Norma Lee) Why does she say that every time?
The point being, dementia is a nasty disease. It destroys the synaptic connectivity of your brain cells (I made that up) and affects families like no other disease (except Alzheimer's and impotence). But don't, not for one minute, believe that your grandmother doesn't understand what's going on around her. One misplaced bedpan joke could get you cut out of a will.
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Ross Cavins
