~ dementia and psychosis swirls on the home front ~
It’s not often that you find yourself tootling along on a local bus in Malaga with your soon to be five year old, after a glorious day of antics a la playa - including topless bathing and merman sandy burials – when you find yourself struck by the notion that your life has featured two significant psychotic spirals, so extreme in their ferocity that it seems uncanny that we exist so peacefully in their wake.
Flashes of these kinetic explosions return frequently like skittish dragonflies. I can hear them before I see them, sense the beating wings, the memories of sleepless convictions, a body convulsing on a stretcher, confused and startled, signs and signals everywhere, communicating from another realm.
There is much to make one’s stomach churn and tighten of late. From hellish torture and genocide on a global scale, to a home front where my dear papa is very much on a slippery slope of rapidly declining cognition as dementia engulfs him. Daily life is a veritable roundabout of overwhelm and anxiety.
Mental health imbalance is a fair weather friend, or should I say a turbulent wretch, ever-prowling with her coaxing snarl, all too eager to resettle in my midst.
But dementia appears more unruly than any psychosis tsunami I have ridden, her iron-clad grip tight and unrelenting, with no glimpse of reprieve or recovery.
She takes you further and further from yourself, tipping out sense, stealing functionality and shrouding normalcy in a ghostly blanket where familiarity is a distant speck.
As we hurtle along a palm tree lined street, careening through a narrow calle, a dragonfly lands. As always there is a terrifying flicker of a mattress on a cement floor under fluorescent lights, then a young girl hurling herself at my door, clawing at the handle. A shaft of sunlit in an otherwise grey courtyard, bloodcurdling dawn shrieks.
The ghouls of psychosis loom large. And I wonder if similar spirits haunt my father as he spends so many listless hours wandering the halls of the hospital.
He remains passionate and loving with my mum, blowing kisses and breaking her heart as he follows her to the ward doors, hoping to come back home, only ever wanting to be by her side. But his disillusion is overpowering, his discombobulation visceral and his reversion to Italian or Neapolitan to explain himself or dish out orders to his fellow patients is all-consuming.
The most painful element is knowing how much he would hate to see himself in this state. He no longer wanted to live if he didn’t have independence and full control of his sensibilities and functions.
I wish we could grant his wishes, set him free from confusion and fear, allow him to go quietly into the night knowing that he was liberated and peaceful. And yet there is no such option. So we hold his hand, shave his stubble and continue loving a man who is but a whisper of the Italian stallion who once held us so tightly.