Perceptions

How perceptions do seem to vary from one person to another as well as over time.

Different people have different ways of thinking. Time?  Time gives us new discoveries and enlightenment born of additional information.  Very often we will, as we get older, assess and process information differently.

Everybody used to say that Granfer Harris—who was, it must be said, my Great Grandad, was difficult.  Mum would frequently tell me that he was a hard man to please.  But, then, he was old.  Us old people get away with a lot because people don’t expect too much of us; we can be rude and people will just shrug and whisper, “He’s old...”

At least now I can say a girl is pretty (or shapely) without anybody thinking that I’m trying to chat her up!  I’m past that now.  Fortunately, I must say.

But Granfer Harris probably had Alzheimer’s.  My Mum had that and she became very difficult until we managed to get her on the correct medication.  Violent, too.  She was violent but the new drugs—‘Anti-Terrorist’ pills, the Maid called them, worked well and calmed her down for the last few months of her life.

Like Granfer Harris she lived to a ripe old age, she was about 94 (as I have mentioned before).  Also like Granfer Harris, she could not differentiate night from day.  Granfer, my cousin Ann tells me, would often tell her Mum to ‘switch the bloody light off, Mary!’   When the light was already off and the bedroom was dark.

He also ‘saw’ people who had already died.  They weren’t ghosts but people who ‘lived’ in his memory.  Mum had the same thing.  She would walk around at three in the morning calling out for Dad.  “Brin!  Brin!  Are you there, Brin?”  We had to tell her that he was working and that she should rest so that she would be well for when he came home.  Or her sister, Muriel, that died many years ago in Canada; she saw Muriel and herself as young girls.

Occasionally Mum would tell us that she was a young boy.  My wife would be Mrs. Brown (she is brown but that wasn’t, I’m sure, the reason!), or ‘Matron’ if Mum had relapsed back to the orphanage.

Eventually all the recent memory faded out.  She always seem to remember our son here and, sometimes, she might remember who I was but, for the most part, she lived in her youth.

Granfer Harris’ and Mum’s perceptions changed with disease.

I am telling you these things because one of my favourite authors, the great Terry Pratchett, has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Yes, I know that this is hardly ‘hot off the press’ but it is something that we have to address.  He is, I am sure, terrified of not being able to function as he would wish but, on the bright side (if there is one), he will not be aware of what is happening.

Mum slipped away peacefully on Monday morning having had a good night’s sleep for the first time in many, many weeks.

Those of us that are left behind will bear the grief.  We will have to accept the loss.

When Asimov passed on we knew then that there would be no more ‘Foundation’.  When Arthur C Clarke died in his beloved Sri Lanka there would be no more space odysseys or rendezvous with Rama.

One day there will be no more ‘Discworld’.

And that, dear souls, will be a sad loss.