I entirely agree. I really, really REALLY don’t want to be like my mother.
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Good news, there are things we can do that could make a difference.
By the time my mother was my age (56) she didn’t know who I was, couldn’t recognise herself on a photograph and would eat anything in a bowl including cigarette ends, pistachio shells and olive stones. She had echolalia and couldn’t really speak because she couldn’t reason.
If your only experience of dementia is age-related dementia which is primarily what this article is about, then I think you probably cannot imagine the physical difficulties of dealing with dementia in a very physically fit 50 year old who plays golf 3 or 4 times a week and thinks you are kidnapping her when it is time to get in a car and go home after eg lunch.
My mother will be 78 this year, she is at home, supine and silent, we have lived with dementia for about 30 years now.
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Hard to comprehend what that must be like.
I find it shocking that there is so little help for carers, sometimes children, who bravely do what they think is their personal duty, while society dismisses their plight as “not our problem.”
We lived with it for about 7-8 years with both MIL (vascular dementia) and FIL (Alzheimers). And that nearly floored us. So 30 years entitles you to a lot of respect.
As a single parent with a teenage daughter, I took the easy way out and put my mother in an old people’s home, where I believe they did their best for her.
But I got a stinging, lecture from an Indian lady doctor, who thought the English were barbaric in their neglect of their elders.
It took all my willpower to resist telling her that the old lady had flatly refused to throw herself on her husband’s funeral pyre!