| Photo by Mali Desha on Unsplash
Her sister opens the bedroom door, and there she is, seated at the edge of the bed, stiff as a mannequin. Her face is contorted, her eyes gazing at emptiness. Her eyes have lost their sparkle. She is in one of her episodes, which has become more frequent lately. She has Parkinson’s Disease, a burden she has carried in the last several years. Now that she is in her mid-60’s, she’s all alone. Feeling trapped between his wife’s debilitating, progressive disease and caring for her, whose mercurial disposition and whims descend into poor judgment, he bailed out. His desperation drove him into an all-or-none gambit, and he took the exit. The marital oath “to love for better or worse, in sickness or health” has become meaningless in the face of an illness that robs the person of her old self and turns life into an unbearable hell.
Her sister stands by the door, stumped, puzzled by the unrecognizable person who has become of her. The gregarious and easy-going soul is gone. Instead, an unrecognizable person with an unpredictable and capricious bent has settled in. With only her sisters left to look after her and help put her affairs in order, she often tested their patience. They are her only family now. She has been through several caregivers who quit or were fired. She got them burned out in a matter of months. Everyone wonders if it is the disease that has turned her into a difficult, irrational, self-centered, demanding creature or something else.
The family is on the hunt for a medical person to attend to her medical needs and an institution that could provide and meet her needs. She resists seeing a doctor out of her paranoia of being declared insane and denies she needs to be under a supervised living arrangement. She has not come to terms with her loss and the painful reality of her debilitating and progressive condition. Her denial has turned into a delusion that she is still in total control of her life. It’s a sad reality that she has already lost it. Efforts to get her the right help have become difficult sometimes without her full cooperation.
“Old age is like the season, with its unpredictable weather patterns. It’s a reckoning of transgressions committed in past lifestyles and abuses incurred on the body. The sins of intemperance are catching up.”
Old age is like the season, with its unpredictable weather patterns. It’s a reckoning of transgressions committed in past lifestyles and abuses incurred on the body. The sins of intemperance are catching up. The vagaries of health can very well be in the predispositions we carry in our DNA, made worse by circumstances abetted by poor choices we made. Whatever it may be, we look at the dusk of life with fear. The most fearsome is the gradual or sudden loss of mental power. A simple task that used to come easy has become a challenge. Short-term memory is failing, making daily life filled with little annoyances of forgetfulness. Some illnesses common in old age rob a person of cherished memories when every moment is a new experience without a context, and everyone is a stranger. The person has become just a hulk, a biological mass without a personality. Often, she is clueless about her flight, but her family is left to suffer in anguish.
We collect good memories, do good things, travel to places we enjoy, and reminisce in old age. We build relationships in a lifetime and surround ourselves with people we love to create a meaningful life. We invest in the future to live out our remaining days in comfort and joy. But what good are all these when we lose our ability to remember too soon? It’s equally terrifying as our fear of death and where we end up after we leave this body.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. Fernando B. Perfas is an addiction specialist who has written several books and articles on the subject. He currently provides training and consulting services to various government and non-government drug treatment agencies regarding drug treatment and prevention approaches. He can be reached at fbperfas@gmail.com.