For about twelve years, I’ve visited a resident—let’s call her Gladys—at the same assisted living facility where my mother spent her last years. We used to talk about current events, revived memories, family circumstances and wisdom of all kinds. Now, with Gladys’s dementia working its will, the back-and-forth of a satisfying conversation might seem impossible. That’s not true, though.
At first, I tried to counter the linguistic gaps—e.g., aphasia, perseveration or lost thought trails. Thinking of these neural errors as barriers to communication, I filled in the forgotten words or syntax. I corrected inconsistencies in a remembered story. Or I asked questions that I thought might prompt the memories necessary to bring some sense to the conversation. That worked for awhile.
Now Gladys and I are at the point where our conversations probably don’t fit usual definitions of spoken interchange. Her vocabulary can vary severely—many misplaced nouns now become “things”. Her answers don’t always match what questions might have brought to mind in earlier years. Sentences are garbled, phrases mashed into illogical sequences and most matters peppered with her reliable conversational gambit, “I don’t remember.”
But because I have learned to recognize assets in her dementia, these are still conversations—sharing meaning and emotions. Gladys guides the conversation’s path. I take advantage of what dementia offers: Slower thinking, expectant silences, shorter exchanges. Her curiosity attaches to smaller matters that previously we would not have considered. Her emotional honesty is on full display. We flit among topics like butterflies among flowers. The puzzle of Gladys’ puzzled thinking presents a challenge to my listening mind, but there’s still room in her soul for my attempts at humor. Some of her words or phrases glimmer as conversational keepsakes. Gladys and I have *dementiated conversations.
Still satisfying, still enjoyable.
*Dementiated takes advantage of ated, a workhorse adjectival suffix that indicates how something is furnished with, affected by or filled with a quality or attribute. (E.g., substantiated—“furnished with substance.”) So our conversations are filled with dementia—a possibly helpful, positive approach to the wonder of communication.
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