A concrete relationship
Lately I’ve been cementing a close relationship with concrete – not that I enjoy hitting the hard stuff. But it is becoming more of an unwelcome habit. But how and why are we such pals at all?
Well there’s gravity, we all know that. Perhaps falling is the new thing in old age though we did it often enough – another universe call Youth. And we don’t consider ourselves old, for baby boomers are the Peter Pans of the world. Could it be something as trivial as a loss of balance? That would account for a number of stumbles and falls accompanied by the kind of commonplace grazes and bruises we wore as badges when we were kids. And then there’s rationalising – always at hand when you want to explain away an issue (today’s trendy word for problem).
Rationalisation leads us down a gentle slope to forgetfulness. It allows us to take refuge in its familiar comforts, despite the fact that we walk into rooms and have no idea why. Or how a perfectly sensible woman one day mistook a white bleach container for a plastic milk bottle – and put it in the fridge….
Others have been stumped by something they’ve habitually done for years – punching what they think are the right numbers on their house security keypad. But numbers can be unforgiving, didn’t count this temporary amnesia – and so set off the house alarm.
Forgetfulness is forgivable, a state of mind, a field which can be ploughed to retrieve temporarily lost moments. But what if it’s more than just that? What if it’s the condition we’ve read about and seen for ourselves in secure wards; the one which makes strangers of loved ones.
What’s a fall or two when compared to indignities of the inmates there? That’s when we realise that our occasional forgetfulness is not so much minor but laughable, and that the word which haunts us most is Dementia, a plague in waiting.
- Dementia in New Zealand is serious. At least 70,000 Kiwis are living with it now according to Statistics New Zealand, Dementia New Zealand and the Alzheimer’s Society.