Living with dementia really depends on your point of view. From my point of view, living with my Dad who has dementia means a lot of things. Mainly, it means learning a mantra:
It doesn't matter
It is hard. It doesn't matter.
It is probably one of the hardest things I have had to learn. It doesn't matter.
A lifetime of habit to break. It doesn't matter.
My dad has dementia. For him, this means he literally is loosing him mind. It means he is confusing, conflating, confabulating.
It doesn't matter.
It means that he remembers that he dropped out of school at the 9th grade because he got caught by his dad opening Grandpa's wine and Grandpa took him down to join the Navy. It doesn't matter that these things happened several years apart. To him, this was reality. Of course my initial urge is to correct him... because that's what we do, right? But... It doesn't matter.
It happened over 60 years ago... no one will be harmed in the miss-telling of this story. It doesn't matter.
He tells my sister that we took a trip and got just about every detail of the trip incorrect. It doesn't matter. The purpose of the trip was to get him out of the house and have a nice day. I am a little sad that he suffered confusion on the trip due to his faulty memory and my initial urge is to correct him to make him try to feel better, but in fact, it most likely won't make him feel better and there is no reason to make that confusion worse by pointing out that his reality ... well... isn't. It doesn't matter.
It is really hard not to correct even the smallest thing. Sometimes, it just comes out of my mouth before I realize what I am saying. Another hard thing to learn is to not beat myself up over it when I forget.
The goal is to make him comfortable by reducing his levels of confusion. One of the main ways to do that is to simply not try to change or challenge his 'reality'. Because, really... in the scheme of things... It doesn't matter.
