Dementia and Free Soul

Krishna Sharma

Writer Krishna Sharma

Certain moments of life can’t be sincerely communicated. Words become fluffy and flimsy. They fail to be photographic in expression, no matter how hard one tries to capture them from the deepest lens of one’s heart.

I cannot exactly express the feeling that weighed on in my heart when I met my beloved grandmother of 101 years this past April at my home village of Makrahar in Lumbini. Her purpose in life had come to a halt and she was challenging death to come and take her away. “Sad part is that I sincerely ask death to come and take me. It just would not come!,” she would report to me rather glumly. Sadly, her love for her own life now seems to have emptied.

Except for her diminishing body and fading memory, there was nothing that had changed much when I had last seen her three years ago in 2011. She could see, listen, talk, take shower by herself and walk with us bare feet on the pasture land, although with frequent stops.

She never aged before my eyes, partly because she was already in her late sixties, fixed in her look, when I was still a child; and partly because she never really did seem to change. She looked the same to me when I was a teenager; when I was a young man; and even the last time I saw her when I was 39 and she was in her late 90’s. There was a little bit more halt than I could remember. She was little bending over. But the look was still the same: a skinny long but oval face with silver hair on her head and bright brown eyes fixed above tear bags that had become a little bigger than they were the last time I had noticed them. Her lower eyebrows were no more as they had bothered her eyeballs so much that they were removed permanently through a surgery.

Dildhara Sharma is 101. The onset of dementia 
started since January 2014

When we would call her over the phone she used to make us feel guilty as she would say, “I don’t want to die before I see you all one more time.”

Saddest thing is she is not telling this anymore now. Dementia is taking toll on the remaining part of her life. It took three long hours for her to recognize that I was her grandson. But then within a few minutes she would totally forget her beloved grandson and granddaughter-in-law, and the great grandsons and daughters and would start talking to us about the times when she was a child growing up in the hills of the western district of Gulmi as if we were her childhood friends.

However, at times, she would be in her perfect mental order. While I and my brother were talking about Nepal’s new Prime Minister Sushil Koirala, she would jump from her bed and would express her surprise.

“Now, Sushil is the Prime Minister of Nepal?” she would ask in disbelief.

Then she would add, “He has come to this house some 30 or more years ago along with Girija Prasad Koirala. I remember offering milk tea to those tall people on that balmy evening. They looked really restless since they had seen their cadre being killed on that very day.”

Koirala duos with a few party workers had in fact visited our house to see our grandfather in 1980 after they had narrowly escaped the murder attempt orchestrated by local Panchayati gangsters. Local youth leader Mr. Alok was brutally murdered on that fateful day in Surajpura, Rupandehi which is barely five kilometers east from our village.

A vegetarian by family mores, she had startled her in-laws when she followed along the Sanskrit verses while tending cows as her in-laws chanted them clad on white dresses. She hailed from a family which valued education for girls. She must have been the source of inspiration that my grandfather started talking about educating girls soon after returning home from Venaras in India. He was a scholar from Venaras Hindu University who helped spread the value of education for life among villagers in Gulmi. He is still known to the locals in Gulmi as andha pandit – a blind priest – who had but founded his own library named after him – Keshab Pustakalaya which was then not very well organized but open to the villagers for outreach on a condition that the books were kept intact while being read and are returned as soon as they are read or used for religious purposes. When our family migrated to the plains of Lumbini, the library was handed over to the local school where my father had served as headmaster.

Late Keshab Raj Sharma, the founder of
Keshab Pustakalaya in Gulmi. All the
books were donated to local Prithvi
High School when Sharmas migrated to
the Rupandehi in late seventies.

She was such a strong democratic character that local leaders of various strata would always come to get her endorsement and receive her blessings before they would even start their election campaign. After winning elections, they would make it a point to first visit to her to share the news.

She was so strong hearted that when a group of Maoists reached her to stop me from writing against them in 2003, she told them to go do whatever they wanted. She must have been inspired for democracy seeing her own younger brother (now deceased) Ghanashyam Ghimire who fought against Panchayat regime on behalf of Nepali Congress. He was jailed for revolting against King Mahendra’s bloodless coup and had to spend the rest of his adult life bedridden after the police loyal to the monarch broke his back while he was found escaping from Palpa jail in 1960.

Family and society was always first for her. Although religious, she never intimidated others on the basis of what caste they belonged to. The most fascinating thing about her is that she always stood for truth and she took no sides. My mother and my wife are fond of her especially because she always treated them as her own daughter and granddaughter. Now that Dementia makes her confused and unable to remember people and names it brings tears to our eyes.

However, when she sees us crying, she says, “I think you belong to me. You are crying seeing me this old and dying. …No sobbing anymore. It makes you weak while it makes me sad.” The onset of dementia had started giving her hard times since last January. Memory loss and impaired judgment are what she is suffering from.

Once she starts losing language and is unable to perform some daily activities such as using restroom on her own, taking shower on her own and returning home from a walk, life would be really tough on her honest soul. However, the best part is that her soul would continue to be free and out of touch from worldly affairs that are not so good.

According to World Health Organization (WHO) and Alzheimer’s disease International report 2012, there were 35.6 million people globally with dementia, including Alzheimer’s.

With the United States adding one Alzheimer’s patient every 67 seconds, especially among baby boomers, the government and the Congress are mulling to develop a foundation for Alzheimer’s fund to better address the issue.

While this is my family saga I have witnessed over the years, there are hundreds of thousands of others who go unnoticed in a society like ours where senior care is a far cry, functioning mental healthcare is a distant dream and government initiative is not yet on a priority list. With changing life style, living patterns and families being nuclearized due to necessities and comfort this story is likely to be every household’s story for a foreseeable future.

Let’s hope the Constituent Assembly will take into account the need for more social welfare funds for the elderly before the government’s budget is given a green signal.

Somebody has said, “God protects insane, children and the aged.” Let’s pray, whoever said this was right.

(This article is dedicated to many grandparents like my own who are hardly noticed with the palpable condition in Nepal. - Writer)