Chocolate and ice-cream – Jen Hocking

Alzheimer’s is a creeping disease.

You have flashes of it at first – is Dad just getting old and changing?

Is personality a fixed thing or do people really continue to change?

Does everyone have a kernel inside of who they are?

Then, it’s like dog’s balls.

You want to stop believing that it’s happening, but there it is.

Dad has got dementia.

Either that, or he’s a complete prick and you just never noticed.

And then the worst/best thing happens – he turns and asks you: “what’s happening to me? what’s wrong with me? Why are we here seeing this psychiatrist?”

And you catch it in your throat and say, “well, because you have this thing called dementia Dad. And it’s not going to get better.”

And you hug each other and cry together in the waiting room of this prick psychiatrist, in front of a bunch of people you don’t know and you think – so that’s the Dad I used to know.

He’s still there. But he’s also gone.

And for the rest of his life you kind of want him to die, because what is life if it’s not being who you are?

And, in a way, being who he was kind of killed him in the end.

When the speech pathologist outlawed squares of milk chocolate and ice-cream because of “aspiration risk” we ignored it for a while.

But then we got down to thickened water – WTF is that? And he voted with his feet and stopped eating anything.

And then, gradually, slowly, he died.

I tell you, if I had the choice of drinking thickened water and living or ice-cream and dying – I know which way I’d fly.