‘tenderness is something I am fortunate to feel everyday from the warm embrace that I get each day from my wife to being told by my youngest daughter that she loves me’

Hi Ron Coleman here with my first dementia diary of 2019 First of all I want to wish you a happy new year. I am by nature a planner and when working on doing my diary I confess that I plan it beforehand. The main reason for this is to ensure that I say what I mean to say.
I am a relatively young 60 year old this means I am meant to be living in the 60 is the new 50 era instead I often feel because of my diagnoses that 60 has become the new 70 certainly in the way many people talk to me or rather don’t talk to me but talk instead to my wife or who ever I am with.
This has led me to conclude that during 2019 I will use my dementia diary to explore different issues that are often difficult to talk about. Today I want to start a discussion on relationships, tenderness and sexual intimacy.
Like most people my main relationships are with my partner and my children my youngest child will be 16 in February this year and my wife is in her 50s. My wife and I fell in love the day we met. Like all newly in love couples we were passionate in our love and spent as much time together as possible though our passion quietened over time I still enjoyed making love and found that intimacy was equally enjoyable when love making was tender and thoughtful as it was in the throes of new loves overwhelming passion learning about your partner takes a long time and though in age terms we were getting older in my head I am still that same lover that I had been when we first got together.
My Dementia is changing things for me I no longer have memory of our lovemaking over the last eighteen months or so as when we do make love I only remember it for three days then it is gone as if it never was. For those three days I have beautiful memories of the tenderness that is still a feature of my life because of Karen. Just as important is that tenderness is something I am fortunate to feel everyday from the warm embrace that I get each day from my wife to being told by my youngest daughter that she loves me. For me the tenderness that is real in my family allows me to retain my role as a father to my daughter emotionally and importantly for both my wife and I, I can still be my wife’s husband and lover dementia is a condition it does not and never will define me.
Speak soon