Thank you, Misssy, for your sharing your reflections on having someone close to you decline with worsening dementia. I hope your father is able to have a good deal more time of reasonable independence. He sounds like a caring man.

It is brave of you to talk candidly about your feelings regarding your dad and his mother. To a large extent it renains a mystery to us all as to what exactly goes through the mibd of someone with advanced dementia. You are raising very difficult to answer questions that, I think, we do need to discuss, as a society and in the contexts of our families. When I worked as a nurse, there was one evening when I stood over the bed of a man with very extrene dementia and I asked myself the following question: "Is what I see lying in this bed still even a human being?" I then felt guilty for even having that thought - which I considered to be, at some level, a sinful idea to even entertain. We shy away from asking these questions, but I think they do arise in our minds and those doubts affect how we treat people and allow them to be treated. You are being very honest about what as gone through your mind dealing with dementia in your own family. I think that's where we have to start, in discussing what we need to think about. More and more of us eventually deal with this, as people are surviving longer and longer into old age.