Facing Reality -You can’t change anyone except yourself, but do stand-up for yourself while you can

Here I am again, as you know I’ve been having a bit of a hard time accepting my diagnosis and really struggling with trying to understand this crazy thing called dementia.

 Most especially driving me bonkers (no pun intended) were people insisting to me that I should behave differently … perhaps this is the mild, insidious side to the more vociferous dementia deniers??

 Following a very helpful and supportive Zoom meeting with you, my wonderful wonky-minded dementia tribe, I  found myself sobbing while listening to George’s beautifully-worded heartfelt poem about life and death, irreversibility andfate.

 I’m no poet like George but reading his words, I felt happier than I’ve done for many months and it reminded me of another very old poet (sorry George) who wrote:

The moving finger writes and having writ moves on.

Not all thy piety, nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line.

Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

 About 900 years after Omar Khayyam had penned those words in his Rubaiyat he was echoed by the impressive Khalil Gibran in his book The Prophet:

 We would ask now of death:

You would know the secret of death, but how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?

If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto

the body of life.

For life and death are one, even as the river & the sea.

 As I woke up this morning I was literally giggling (crikey is this a new symptom of dementia?).

AND the detail surrounding why I knew of the wise words above came flooding back, my wonderful dad Charlie used to quote them to me (amongst assorts of other stuff), with boring regularity, in my childhood.

 Although I’d never actually understood them at the time, they’re making a lot of sense to me now.

My addled brain seemed, this morning, more settled than it’s been for a long while and I thought: 

Just try and live with what IS and let go of what is no-longer

and also:

You can’t change anyone except yourself, but do stand-up for yourself while you can, you’re still Lynne.

 I closed the conversation with my friend saying that she was a good woman and I still loved her and that she had beena wonderful season in my life, but my life has now radically changed and she was proving unable to support me in that change.

I wished her well but said that I hoped that she might remember some of the things I’d said, because they might help her cope better, should she or a person close to her, be afflicted with dementia in the future.

We parted with a hug