Of course Elinor Lipman's essay in The New York Times' "Modern Love" column caught my eye. Some promotional type summarized: "Dementia turns an elegant man into a gregarious child."That elegant man was her husband, Bob, whom she was married to for 30-plus years. Bob, who was a radiologist. Bob, who was 57 when his wife and grown son noticed something was amiss.
I read to where she described "the cruel disease that felled him was frontotemporal lobe dementia--rare, untreatable and fatal, and one that often turns its victims into violent, angry and inappropriate versions of their normal selves."
My Dad has become those things. Sadly. Predictably. Just like the neurologist who saw him in October 2008 said he would. Violent at times, angry at times, inappropriate at times. But still, often, himself. My aunt visits, and he pulls out her chair like the gentleman he's always been.
Elinor writes that FTD would "change and diminish" her husband, and then kill him three years and eight months after the first signs of trouble. Eventually, his language was whittled to a four-word answer to everything: "I'm a happy guy," he would say.
Which of course makes me wonder about my Dad's final words. His voice still has his chipper, inviting tone, though the words he says no longer plug into conversation. Will they encapsulate his life in some way? Have a double meaning? Be humorous? Make any sense at all?
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