Friday 21 / February / 2025
When my cousin told me that our father-in-law exhibits signs of dementia, I said I was not surprised at all considering his very advanced age.
He is 95 and you do not get to live that long without a few hiccups along the way. But it got me thinking. Old age is not just a physical challenge but the biggest hurdle is the thinking process when a person sits on the chair all day long and the only distraction is the television.
As I was writing these lines, my thoughts tried to analyse the routine of my father-in-law whenever I go to visit him. People who have dementia forget the present events but always remember the past. That is the reason why old people talk a lot about their youth. However, there could be another reason that some older people appear forgetful about the present.
They may not want to be reminded about certain people or occasions because the topic is very uncomfortable or even painful for them to talk about. So, they fake dementia by pretending that they do not remember the names or even the subjects. I guess it is a natural protective mechanism for their mental wellbeing. If my theory is right, why do they do that?
They may well want to be left alone with their own thoughts and do want anyone to interfere. They create a formidable mental barrier to keep the rest of us away. In our case, meaning my cousin and I, we are sometimes too intrusive and for him to fake dementia, is a legitimate way to keep us at bay. When you come to think of it, the mental activities, in all of us, are always underestimated.
And again, in my capacity as a non-medical person, neurologists are often too quick to come to a conclusion. They claim that the devastations of old age lead to dementia when they ignore the fact that some older people choose to forget to blank out bad memories. Let’s look at it this way. When you wield a knife in front of people, they have the natural tendency either to run away or defend themselves.
I always say that physical violence is no match to mental abuse. Harsh words can lead to mental torture and can lead to intolerable pain. Mind you, harsh words, when they keep ringing in our mind years after they were spoken, can do considerable damage to our health. So, an innocent word spoken now can trigger memories of the past that some of us would rather forget.
This is the reason why I came to a conclusion that at least half of the older people who neurologists diagnosed them as having dementia, are really faking it. You cannot really hold responsible old people for pretending that they don’t remember what they ate yesterday when they really do. It is just they don’t want to get into the subject.
That does not mean their minds are empty or locked in the past. I am convinced that they use their idle time, while trapped into an armchair, to let their thoughts wander to an imaginary world to keep themselves amused. While all this time, we say they suffer from dementia. I bet they laugh silently when they read the signs in our faces and they say quietly to themselves,” what an idiot for getting it wrong.”
