The cancer story

Dad's younger brother died of cancer in his fifties.  Not long afterwards Dad himself took early retirement - this was back in the days when men were sometimes offered packages they would have been fools to refuse.  For some reason these two facts have got linked in his mind as cause and effect.  His brother died of cancer, which meant that he had to retire?  No, I don't get it either.  Dad reckons his brother contracted the disease because of stress: well, it's true he had a quite high-powered job, but so do lots of people.  Dad's own job wasn't particularly stressful so why should he be any more prone to cancer himself?  Anyway, the narrative is now fixed in his memory.

What's more, it keeps coming out.  Every week my sister in law drives him to Sainsbury's, does her shopping, waits a no doubt unconscionable length of time while he does his, drives him home again.  She's good like that, but her two complaints are 1] he pongs of wee - to which unsavoury subject I must return and 2] she keeps hearing the same stories.  One week Dad told her, not for the first time, about his brother's cancer on the way to Sainsbury's.  Then there was an appeal for some cancer charity at the supermarket, so whaddyer know: she got the same story again on the way home, with no memory that he'd already told her, earlier that morning.

So far, so typical of dementia.  Here's the weird bit.  This week I was down in Grottsville, visiting Dad on what was his normal shopping day and we'd agreed I would drive the three of us to Sainsbury's.  So this time I got the cancer story, but as if he was telling my sister in law - who if she were hearing it for the first time could not have been expected to know.  Dammit I'm family, and I do know.  What's more, I shared in the conduct of my uncle's funeral with the local minister.  Dad remembered that, and told me that "Peter" (that's me) "helped to take my brother's funeral."  He talked to me, about me, as if I was an absent third party.  In that moment he neglected to register who I was. 

In the later stages of dementia, sufferers forget their own family members.  Dad's a long way off that yet but this was a chilling taster for what may yet be to come.