09/15/2024
Vivid in my mind, like I was there to witness it, was a memory my mother, Betty, shared years before her dementia journey began.
She described how she woke from time to time, not long after she was first married, to see my father dissecting a human brain at the desk in the bedroom. “What are you looking for?” she’d ask him. “I’m looking for the seat of consciousness, for the soul,” he’d say.
“Don’t strain your eyes, come back to bed,” she would say something like that.
Intuitively, Mum knew the soul or the human spirit would not be found in the crenellations and paté-like structures of the brain.
But he was a surgeon; if something existed, it had to have a physical structure that could be located.
We might laugh at this now, but this type of thinking is much more prevalent than we may think.
In fact, this thinking permeates our society.
It’s like the empty land of North America; it did not exist before Columbus discovered it.
There’s a blind spot in our society. It’s the real reason we never seem to resolve the issues around aging and dementia, and Long Term Care.
That blind spot relates to a patriarchal view of the world around us. It is fundamentally a material world, a world of matter and all that relates to matter. It’s about survival, survival of the fittest. It’s a story we tell ourselves about how the world is and how it works.
The most straightforward way I can express this is that if we lived in a genuinely matriarchal society, the elderly, the vulnerable and the disabled would be well looked after—full stop. No provincial “Fixing the Long Term Care Act” or Federal "Safe Long Term Care Act” would be needed. We wouldn’t hear new outrages from Long-Term Care homes daily in local and national newspapers. Years would not go by without change after change, yet things are fundamentally the same.
That’s because men like my Dad are trying to locate the soul and the emotions and understand relationships from a purely rational, materialistic perspective.
That’s why my brother did not acknowledge our mother’s dementia until she was in the last stages. Not until he was in the MRI control room and saw the widespread damage to his mother’s brain as the scans were becoming more detailed, layer by layer.
Why do we have no good paths through dementia after all these years? Only some outlier stories of joy and wonder that very few seem to be able to follow.
There is largely pain and a sea of unresolved grief in this society’s collective experience of dementia. The fear keeps us blind and denial keeps the fear at bay so we can function with the hope that our parents don’t have it, or worse still, the enemy is NOT inside the gates and slaughtering our own neurons.
There is a path that is constantly overlooked and will continue to be so as long as the patriarchy exists, as long as the saviour is science, and as long as we are stuck in fear rather than coming from a place of love.
Relationships, like the soul and the emotions, exist but are invisible when viewed from the material plane.
They are some of the most powerful things in the human experience. Unless we make them visible, unless we account for them, we won’t be able to find our way out of this dementia care tangle.
