Fading Memories: No One Heard Her Vanish

It started small. 

Things like forgetting where the remote was or where she put her phone.
No one thought much of it, cos everyone forgets where their phone is sometimes, right? 

Then it started to escalate. 

First, it was the lies. That was what I called it when they started.

To be honest, I did not know better. 

She’d tell people she never did things when it was clear she did. 

Then she started to tell people she hadn’t eaten all day, but I was the one who fed her, more than once. 

I was confused and annoyed, as it made me seem like I was torturing a poor, old, helpless woman. 

After a while, it worsened. 

She forgot names, then who people were, and eventually, she started to forget her family, even her children. 

Sometimes I would catch her in a daze, forgetting who she was or where she was.  

We all assumed it was her age. 

I mean, she had been battling with health issues for a long time, and that might’ve hastened her aging process. 

She was already losing her sight and mobility. 

Her mind was next too……. We guessed. 

The last time I visited her, she seemed like a shadow of her former self. 

Try to hold on to what she once was. 

I called out to her and told her who I was, hoping she would remember. 

When she finally did, I wondered if it could be what I feared. 

I didn’t want to make assumptions, as I only took a beginner psychology class, so I kept it to myself.

Later, the violence came. 

She bit, scratched, and harmed her caretakers. 

No one knew what was wrong with her. 

Perhaps she resented the fact that she could no longer be independent and had to rely on others to attend to her basic needs. 

We tried to get her help, but no one seemed to know what was wrong. 

We visited doctors, asked if there were side effects of the medications she’s taking, and we were told it was just part of the aging process. 

Eventually, we got a diagnosis, and it was what I feared. 

It was Dementia.

A lot of her behaviours started making sense. 

Like the lies and the violence. 

I felt sad knowing that if I had spoken up early, there might’ve been something the doctors could’ve done. 

But who are we fooling?? 

In this part of the world, no one believes in the “fantasy called mental illnesses”

So they wouldn’t have taken it seriously anyway. 

When she passed, I was sad, broken. 

Mostly because I never got to tell her I had forgiven her for the lies she told against me. 

I never got to tell her that it wasn’t her fault, that her mind just went against her, and that who she was at the end of her life wasn’t who she had always been. 

She passed after years of struggling without a diagnosis cos the world we live in does not believe in the illness that drove her to her death. 

She passed, joining the number of people who remained an unclassified statistic. 

Because the world we live in does not give them a second glance. 

Featured Image by StockSnap from Pixabay