Look at Them Swim

This is the essay I submitted to Chicken Soup for the Dementia Soul.  I did not hear back from them, and the book comes out on 4/22/2014, and you're supposed to hear back two months before.  So here it is for your enjoyment, and  you don't have to buy the book.Look at Them SwimDementia is a terrible disease and as it progresses, most days are filled with incidents we’d rather forget.  But every once in a while, there are brief moments of joy and laughter.My dad had Alzheimer’s for four years, and his first symptoms were speech-related (aphasia).  As the disease progressed, what he had to say became more and more random and often unintentionally hilarious.  Some people have said, “How could you laugh at your sick father?”  Those people have never lived with someone who has dementia.  You take the fun where you can get it.  His lack of connection to the real world sometimes made him adventurous.  We’d take him out to eat and he’d look at the pictures on the menu.  “What do I eat here?” he would ask us, pointing.  “Do I eat this?  Does this one go with that one?”  “You like this one,” I’d show him.  “Remember?  We used to get it when we went on vacation in Plymouth every year.”“Oh, the beach!  I like it there.”  And he’d be off, talking about the beach we visited every summer for thirty years.  How we would walk around in the tidal pools at low tide ...
Source: Had a Dad Alzheimers Blog - Category: Dementia Authors: Source Type: blogs