“A more compelling case for lying,” Alok Menon.  These words are an incredibly short snippet from a gorgeous piece Menon performed regarding the death of his grandfather who passed related to Alzheimer’s.  These words struck me from personal experience.  Thinking, is there ever really a reason to lie?  Is there ever a reason for us to create a false sense of reality in order to appease the actual reality?  It doesn’t change what’s happening.  But there is a point in life that I’ve witnessed multiple times now where the reality that is no longer matches the reality that plays in a persons mind.  I’m not talking about delusion or fear.  This is a circumstance where the brain can no longer support what is.  In the cases I’ve witnessed it has been the result of dementia and Alzheimer’s.  There is nothing more cruel to me than watching the mind deteriorate.  The person you know and love is physically there, present, but they aren’t.  So we find a way to meet them where they are and sometimes that means creating a different reality for a while—or at least meeting them in their reality.  The mind is an incredible machine and this is demonstrative of how we can control it 

We can go into all the medical reasons and physical changes that happen with diseases like dementia and Alzheimer’s but there comes a point where, frankly, all of that is irrelevant.  No amount of understanding the physiological changes or the projected mental decline will ever truly prepare a person for experiencing the loss of someone who is still physically there.  What I found interesting in my experience with this is that there seems to be no pain in the person—the cases I witnessed were non-aggressive or fear based—just a near regression quality.  I wished I could go back with them at times.  I wished I could go back to the place they were and feel safe again.  For just as disorienting as it must be for them, it is for us too.  And I didn’t adapt well.  I fought the person they were becoming because it didn’t match my reality.  I didn’t want it to.  I wanted what I knew, never thinking that was what they wanted too.  The resistance I felt at meeting them where they were, constantly telling them we talked about this, served nothing.  It was me fighting the reality.  I was used to the quick loss, the unexpected loss—I never understood this lingering loss where they were still so very much alive and here but they were impossibly gone at the same time.

So when Menon shared his experience with his grandfather, it triggered something in me.  We all have to take up the mantle of our lives, of our family at some point.  We steer the course.  We direct our lives and while it is jarring to see those who were at the helm for so long fall away, we would all have to take that place at some point. My discomfort was a resistance to the changes I would have to go through as well as dealing with the loss of the person as I knew them.  Menon’s statement is indicative of a person ready to take the helm, to take over.  While not entirely sure of what comes next, they are still ready to accept their role and put aside their fears of the change for the comfort of someone they love.  The person they knew isn’t entirely there but they are willing to take up the same role that person served for them: helping transition.  We were lied to all the time and we got through.  Now we do the same.  We lie to live, to help them and ourselves get through.  Life is nothing but change and sometimes that means telling a story that doesn’t quite align for a time.  Because someday someone will tell us a story that doesn’t align as well.