A dementia diagnoses can often be a motivator for documenting family history. We want to capture family stories before they are forgotten or modified beyond recognition, but we don’t always know how to get started. And sometimes we don’t know how true the stories are we are being told.
Dementia Diagnoses
Procrastination gets to all of us, but this is the time to get inspired and follow through. Dementia has three stages, Early, Moderate and Severe. The truly scary part is, dementia is something we start to see in hindsight. Meaning that once the diagnoses has been made we see that the behavior changes started years before. Sometimes up to ten years before.
Documenting Dementia
Recently I’ve seen a few people documenting the journey’s they have taken with their parents and grandparents through the nasty decline of dementia. It’s a horrible decease that reeks havoc on just about all parts of quality of life.
As a filmmaker I thought about ways I could share our own story. Videoing the actual decline of my mother in law wasn’t something I could find a way to tell in any meaningful way. Maybe I’m just too close to it. And there are so many people out there already doing that. Maybe I’ll think of something too late.
Right now these are people I follow and generally admire their strength and courage:
Molly & Joey – A new episode about every week as Joey shares intimate details of his Mom’s journey.
Time with Dad – An article about Randy Baughn documenting his Dad’s journey through pictures.
Tips to Remembering With Dementia
Depending on the stage it can be difficult to get someone to talk who is suffering with dementia. So the earlier the better. In fact speaking in general can be one of the modified behaviors. My Mother in Law was the life of the party, always with a story to tell. Dementia has changed her personality so drastically that she is content to sit and be the quiet wall flower at a gathering. Her stories tend to be the same ones repeated depending on the people in the room. The deeper meanings and nuances gone. We do use yearbooks and old photo albums to help jog her memory and keep her engaged in conversation.
It’s also hard not to lead the witness. Sometimes you can prompt the story too much and you’ll end up hearing a version that has been told mainly through the cues you have provided. In my grandmother’s later years she told me stories that other family members denied, but for general purposes I was able to corroborate. For example she told me a story about needing to walk to pick up milk for the kids during a snow storm. My mother and her sister have denied this story. But I corroborated deep snow records during the time of winter she mentioned, that the person that kept the kids was still alive then as well. I can’t tell you if the story was true, but it was a great story and the events coincide… so at the very least there was a possibility of it.
Blueskies,
Tami