Relative Dementias

There is something so unbelievably cruel about senility, about losing facilities, not all at once, but gradually, and even losing that self-awareness of how bad things have become and are becoming. This poem is a journey into those regions of darkness.

Note: this is personal, because of the effect I've seen on relatives and family, but I do not as yet suffer that kind of memory loss.

Relative Dementias

Drifting away, like shards of ice
Melting in the sun: what price
Memory, the recall of past ages?
Now vanishing softly in stages,
Like dew vanishing in the sun,
Until all the olden days are done;
That intelligence, so acute, bright:
Now just fading into the twilight
Of years: the days by the beach
Lost in darkness, as if a breach
In the world, the sand running out
Until there is just a fearful doubt
And a mere glimpse of time lost;
The price of dementia: the cost
Some days good, some rather bad
And awareness goes too, so sad;
As night falls, and a mist arises,
Portent of the coming demises;
Sound of silence: hearing loss
And nodding wisely, a false gloss
To hide the shame, I cannot hear
And that brings despair and fear;
A slow decline and fall like Rome:
The barbarians at gates of home;
A city under siege: enemy outside
And within, the populations slide
Into fatalism, as an end approaches:
No point in rages, or reproaches;
The city reduced to ruins, rubble,
Hiding in basements, in a bubble;
As Rome falls: no shelter left.
And I am not even bereft:
Robbed of every trace of mind,
A sickness that is never kind;
Words fail me, nothing to be said
As I retire, now dying, to my bed.