By: Rita Bandyopadhyay
It is a very strange connotation that is haunting me for quite some time. We all know Dementia is not a life threatening disease. But there is no other way I can look at it. When my eighty-year old father, a clinically diagnosed dementia patient never came back from his routine morning visit to the fish market nearby (hardly 500 hundred meter away from home), my mother thought he must have gone to somebody else’s house by mistake. She couldn’t even offer his morning tea – because he hurriedly went to the market to buy fish for two of them. “It will take hardly 10/15 minutes; you finish your morning prayer, I’ll go and come back then we’ll have tea together”- these are the words she heard from her husband for the last time. That’s the way he was – a hurried man never listened to his wife, carried only a 100 rupee note to buy fish and a small bag to carry the fish.”
His son-in-law made an identity card for him to carry all the time in his shirt pocket. “Alas! He left the identity card also – but the market is so nearby and he’s been visiting it for the last thirty years. And he buys fish from one particular fish vendor (known by name to all the family members), how can he get lost?” my mother said in despair.
She never believed that he could have lost his ways, neither of her children and one grandson who stays in the same house, thought the same way. After half-an-hour she started looking around and within an hour she started running helter-skelter. One of her sons and grandsons joined the search, but it seemed that the man had just vanished. Her elder son and his family were away, he came back in the afternoon and both the son started a more extensive search but with no result. A missing complaint was lodged in the local police station.
As I was faraway, never knew and could not have even imagined how my mother spent that agonising first night of staying away from her old and mentally unstable missing husband. But the next 24 hours were even more harrowing. She visited all the temples in the vicinity, and then went to a temple in an interior village to pray for her missing husband’s safe return. “If you pray to that god, your wish will certainly be fulfilled” someone said. And she went there to be told by the astrologer priest of the temple “you’ll get some news of your missing husband”.
My mother spent one more sleepless, agonising night praying for the missing man’s safe return. Around ten in the morning one mason in the next house informed there was a dead body found in the jungle near their village. Police was informed, and my father’s moderately decomposed body was discovered and identified by my two brothers, then sent for the post-mortem. My mother was informed that some news of my father has come.
At around ten in the night my brothers received the dead body but my mother was not informed till I reached. Me and my family reached around 12 in the night and went straight to the funeral ground. My mother was allowed to see the body of the man, with whom she spent 54 years of her life, stuffed in a gunny bag camouflaged with garlands and all and then placed in a glass carriage. My mother was brought near the carriage but her reaction was not as hysteric as I expected. She could imagine seeing everybody around or felt imminent disaster in her mind right from the beginning? I didn’t understand but I felt some pinch deep in my heart. As if her expression of grief was not enough to convince me. How mean I could be at that hour of huge personal loss and grief? I was so shaken to know, that, dementia has eaten up my intelligent, sensible father’s brain so much that he could not find his way back home from such a small distance?
There were discussion and debate about the possible reason behind my father’s mysterious disappearance and death among everybody present. But my mother was stoically cool and her all three children were hugely devastated not only for the loss but also for the turn of events. I was watching every reaction and emotions of my mother, at least, for the next 15 days or so. But our misery and pain was far from over, after about an week / ten days when the post mortem report came out, we got to know that some unknown person had murdered my father by slitting his throat. We all were dumbstruck who and for what motive can kill an old and infirm person like my father? Police came home and an FIR was lodged against some unknown person. Theories of possible reasons behind this heinous crime started flowing in the air. Unwarranted advices poured in our life. I kept on observing my mother as much as I could. Probably after losing one of my parents in such a gruesome incident, tried to hold on to her more tightly.
But there was one thing I want to share. For the last one year I was watching helplessly, my father’s gradual loss of memory and being more and more dependent on my mother. She would not complain but once in a while she used to react and shout at my father for his childish behaviour. I told my mother umpteen times that he’s not been able to do anything correctly because of the brain not functioning properly. But after all she is also a human being and I could see clearly how difficult it’s being for her to handle the situation. I used to dare imagining situations for the days to come. So it’s quite natural for her to think about the way-out. Care-givers are more prone to get affected than the person they are caring for. So I tried to talk it out and be always with her emotionally if not physically. In fact number of times I also prayed for my father’s demise than to live a vegetable life. Then why am I so jealous to see her a bit relaxed now? Human mind is so complex – how and why it’s feeling the way – we ourselves fail to understand sometime.
For the next one year all of us fought a real emotional battle. Police inaction and insensitive bureaucratic governance of our state added to our miseries. But it was the toughest struggle my mother had for the period followed. After the initial shock and grief subsided; her mind was overwhelmed by huge amount of guilt, pain, anger, and frustration. She felt almost insane with the impact. I was faraway but tried to be with her over the phone, brought her home to stay with us. After sometime she started talking sense, felt important to be her, poured her heart out whenever felt choked up. Actually it was unloading of emotional burdens for both of us. At the end of the stay over with my family, she came back to her senses and accepted the painful fact that ‘it was destiny that must have played the role in my father’s painful death’. Nobody else was responsible. At the end of three years of this unacceptable truth of our life, we are still coming to terms with. If only police would have been a little more proactive!
