Poetry and Dementia

Poetry and Dementia As a Means to Negotiate Alzheimer’s and Other Related Diseases

Despite striking achievements of science and technology, the problems of human life and destiny have not ended, nor have the solutions been seriously affected by scientific knowledge. Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, which currently affects about 10% of people over 65 years of age and 50% of those over 85 years of age, has no cure. Over 850,000 people in the OK are now living with the devastating disease.

According to a study, unless new treatments are developed to decrease the likelihood of Alzheimer’s disease, the number of individuals with Alzheimer’s disease in the UK may rise to 1.4 million by the end of the year 2040.

Read against this background, Frances Kakugawa’s book, a mix of poetry, story and practical guide, is a recognition of the services rendered by professional and voluntary organizations that seek to minimize the pangs of Alzheimer’s sufferers as well as the sufferings of their near and dear ones.

Poetry and Dementia pays tribute to caregivers who have been untiringly working for creation of a world without dementia, stroke, or cancer just as it seeks to help them endure the innumerable crises of caregiving.

Breaking the Silence: A Caregiver’s Voice merges Frances Kakugawa and her poet-colleagues’ varied experiences with a broad human perspective, engaging both mind and heart. The caregivers seek to share their compassionate spirit with a sense of gratitude to all those who help the victims of Alzheimer’s disease negotiate their mentally vacant existence.

They are not only aware of the sufferers’ substantial loss of brain cells or progressive decline in their ability to think, remember, reason, and imagine, or their language problems and unpredictable behaviour, confusion, or loss of sensory processing, but they also know well how the Alzheimer’s victims suffer a sort of living death, becoming a mere body stripped of its humanity.

They have been witness to caregiving family members of increasingly confused and helpless sufferers themselves often becoming the disease’s exasperated and exhausted victims:

” Is she the mom who nurtured me?
Is it the dementia playing havoc with my mind?
Or is this really my mom? I don’t know.”

(‘More Glimpses of a Daughter and Mother’)

and

“I am torn between two needy factions.
Mom unaware, daughter pushing all boundaries
Both out of control.”

(‘The Sandwich’)

For Frances Kakugawa, caregiving is a mission even as the memory and image of her Alzheimer’s struck mother persists in her life as a “loud presence”.

She gives voice to many caregivers who are ever worried about their loved ones not even able to carry out the simplest tasks and/or are completely dependent on others for their care. She expresses the very haunting fear of death:

“Is she breathing? Is she alive?
Is she finally gone, freeing me once again?
I continue my sentinel watch.”

(‘Unspoken Mornings’)

BOOK REVIEW

Kakugawa, Frances H. Breaking the Silence: A Caregiver’s Voice. Nevada City, California: Willow Valley Press, 2010.