Richie Havens

Love and Dementia

So I finally received the call I’d been dreading for years. It was about mom, of course. She’d been suffering from an illness under that quasi medical rubric “dementia” for at least nine years. That’s back when she started repeating herself noticeably, voluntarily giving up her drivers license and not helping pack for the big move to Costa Rica because the task confused her. For nine years the disease progressed relentlessly, shredding and collapsing her short, intermediate, and long term memory stacks – essentially everything that made her the extraordinary woman she was.