I once heard a story about a Native American Medicine Woman who got dementia. She'd been well-known and respected in her time. But now she was no longer what she had been. She would sit there, vacant, saying nothing, recognising no-one. One day her daughter and a friend were sitting with her, and the friend was commiserating about what a tragedy it was. Suddenly the old lady sat bolt upright, her old self, and said brightly, "Don't worry, dear, I'm just having a different experience." And then reverted to her now familiar dementia self.
My mother had dementia for many years, and once it was obviously there, she became much easier to be with. Before that, she used to drive everyone away, myself included (she had Sun conjunct Mars in Aries.) Once she had made the early and difficult transition, she was happy in a way I had never known her to be. I once said to her, I know you can't communicate, but I think you are having a different experience which is hard for me to imagine, and you seem happy in it. At that point she tried to grab my hand, the first time there had been any kind of attempt at communication from her for a very long time. So maybe she felt recognised. Towards the end, one of the staff at the home commiserated with me about how sad it was, and it was well-meant so I didn't say anything. But I didn't agree.
What occurs to me is that sometimes when people get dementia, maybe it is a necessary corrective to how they have been. It seemed so with my mother. Maybe, for example, if you've been living for all these decades with a strongly defended idea of who you are, then eventually life bursts in as your system ages and demolishes that proud self, allowing you to return home, in a sense to who you always were. My mother announced at one point, while she still had speech, "My name's sixpence." There was an Irish trickster in her. I think she was abducted by the little people when younger - she used to hang out with them as a child - and never fully made it to this world.
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