Dementia

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Dementia,

  Nondescript clouds

    floating over a landscape

      of memories...

Softening

  the shadows

    once sharply defined

      by bright sunshine

Sponging

  color from treescapes,

    lakes, and towns,

      gliding like glaciers

        eroding the hills below

One long day, with

  Overcast thickening,

    shadows deepening,

      colors darkening,

        sounds quieting

The sparkles we loved

  still sparkle, but muted now

    While warm shafts of sunlight

      grow fewer, and farther between,

        still summoned with familiar tunes

A quiet afternoon...

Peace...

Relief from the hot sun of our youth...

A sunset lies ahead to bring sleep...

And so we share happiness as the clouds float by overhead...

The husband of my wife's good friend is slowly losing grip

On plans they make together, as his mem'ry starts to slip 

She knows they have to leave behind the home they've shared for years

And part of every day, she finds she's talking to his fears

He asks about the boxes that he sees around the place

No recall of the explanations given yesterday

Of why they will be moving, why things are rearranged

Unaware that he's the very heart of what has changed

She bears a double burden as she packs away each day

As her grip on fifty years of homelife slowly slips away

One day my wife was helping her, and when she called me back

She said that she was packing up her friend's spice-bottle rack

Poignant, even slightly sad, packed to leave this home

Spices that will follow wherever these two roam

Across the land, a thousand miles down the road, and more

To a new home that this lifelong couple's never known before

Spices for a soup, or for a dinner in the oven

Spices for a fragrant pie, prepared with lifetime loving

But when you stop and think of it, it's really more than this

It's spices to remind them of the things that they will miss

Spice to capture old stone walls, and gently rolling hills

Spice that smells like barns and homes, and early winter chills

Spice that conjures years of church and friends who gather there

Spice that sounds like waterfalls and breezy springtime air

My wife packed up the bottles, and she packed the wooden rack

And helped her friend to look ahead, instead of looking back

Focusing instead upon the joy she knows she'll find

Unwrapping spices in her new home after they've arrived!

Dementia delivers a pain to the heart

For friends whose shared memories are torn apart

Not by malice, but nature, who, no kindly mother,

Steals thoughts friends had kept safe between one another

In matters of faith, it suffers no fools

As half-way goodbyes cruelly break all the rules

When transition away from this life takes years

And slow disappearance triggers dark fears

At the very same time, part here, and part there

We can't be quite sure of exactly where

A portion of someone's soul might reside...

Is it gone forever, or hiding inside?

Or when frontal lobes fail, and suppressed thoughts arise,

Without any filter, they appear, a suprise

From a friend, whose demeanor was once full of tact

Comes anger and pain, from a mind that is wracked

As magnificent intellect peels from the wall

Exposing cracked plaster beneath it all

Paintings and pictures no longer hang there

Replaced by a surface quite drab and quite bare

We learned to say "here today, gone tomorrow"

Then dementia brings us a different sorrow

Half here for today, but half gone the next year

Half lost in the past, with remnants held here

A bit like the gardens we've loved all our lives

Daffodils, crocuses, first to arrive

Then blossoms of summer; no turning around

Before asters accent the leaf-covered ground

I guess it's a turn of the wheel of life

A one-way rotation, a cut of the knife

A harvest of blossoms, a vase to fill

Before winter brings winds and a terrible chill

Dementia. A thief. A sorrow. A tear.

A rip and a loss, a ratcheting gear

A time to pick blossoms, a time for a vase

A sigh, and a hug, and a time to embrace