I don’t know where people go when they travel Dementia Road. I traveled that road with my mom for seven years and most of the time I wasn’t sure where it was headed other than off a cliff. I now think that road exists in an in-between world. Its main travelers seem to be listening to and seeing other people and other voices. I like to think that the Spirits of those who have passed on have come to keep them company.
In A Course in Miracles we are told that “your patience with another is your patience with yourself.“ T-5,VI,11.4. It is easy to become impatient with someone suffering memory loss, especially in the beginning when it’s not clear how much of them is present and how much isn’t. You wonder, do they really not know how to do something or have they learned a sneaky way to get you to do everything?
And when you are tired from trying to take care of every single thing, it’s easy to lose your patience. It doesn’t have to be expressed in a big show of exasperation. Remember, the Course tells us that even a ”slight twinge of annoyance is nothing but a veil drawn over intense fury.” Lesson 21.
And so the Course is telling us that to remain patient means we want to come to a level of self-acceptance that allows all things to be as they are. That means not thinking about all the other “things” that need to be done, which is what usually causes us to become impatient. And it is also telling us that when we allow, completely allow, another person to be as they are, by showing infinite patience, that thought of Love is shared, and that thought us powerful. “Only infinite patience produces immediate effects.“ T-