Mental Health

My Dad has dementia. 

Take him out shopping and the first thing he explains to people is that he has dementia. He does this to excuse his non-typical behaviour, memory lapses and failure to understand things. His memory may have gone, his identity seems to be sliding but apparently his conditioning clings on. He still wants to spare people their discomfort. He explains to me he just wants to make people laugh. He gets visibly upset watching the news. Oh and by the way he has mental illness.

I just wish the rest of the world would join his insanity. It might be a little disorganised. Definitely random. But a hell of a lot better than the current egoic based consciousness has created.

My brother and sister had a meeting with the Mental Health people this week to discuss the "management" of his condition. It was advised that he should not be present and so I volunteered to make him absent for three hours. I took him to my spiritual home, Lullingstone Park Golf Course. We hired a buggy and he hit a few shots and talked fondly of the past. We had a couple of beers in the bar and pointed to his name on the champions board where he and his brother, the other Bill Ayling, won the Everard Cup in 1968 and 1973. He spoke lucidly of his fears and incoherently about someone I had never met. We planned a family golf day and he chatted with other drinkers about God knows what.

The discussions at home centred on all he was incapable of and how to accommodate his inevitable deterioration. Apparently he is going to lose his filters. He will lose his sense of time and often find the world confusing and disorienting. The final piece of advice was actually priceless, as the counselor suggested to my brother and sister they accept and attempt to join his version of reality rather than trying to pull him into theirs. 

Amen.

It seems to me that if we all lived in my Dad's version of reality we might create a world in which we would all be able to watch the news without despair,

Much love

Bill