The Living~Dying Duet: Seeing and Feeling the World Differently

As My Early-Stage Dementia Journey Proceeded, I Sensed the World Through a New Set of Filters

My life has become a Living~Dying Duet. The awareness of my living and dying, and the rest of what was happening to me, brought new filters for how I related to myself and to the world. Things that were previously completely normal were no longer the same. Things that hadn't even occurred to me before became priorities. And all of this topsy-turvy wasn't something I was reading about, they were real things that were happening to me in my daily life.

There are many examples of these changes, and they were coming on thick and fast. I went into input-overload quickly and couldn't take in all of my environment, and even during a normal conversation with somebody I would put up my hand "stop" to let me absorb what was said. I read a portion of the Bible each week and suddenly the Bible was referring to dementia all the time. I gave up on remembering anything about people -- somebody would come up to me that from how they acted obviously I knew, but I couldn't remember their face, their name, or how I knew them (I tried to guess once and it turned out quite badly, so I didn't try again). Songs and humor took on new meanings. I was having feelings for which there weren't even words in the English language, so I had to invent a vocabulary. With the big fist in front of me, being ready for my end took a role in my life that it never had before and I did the prep.

My feeling was -- I was becoming a different me.