Driving is something that people with dementia seem to be able to continue to do long after they shouldn't be allowed to. We had to confiscate my grandfather's car keys because if he found them he would take the car and go to a convenience store. He could not tell his daughter from his wife but he could drive to get coffee.
When my grandmother was developing dementia, she was exactly the same. I am one of the only two girl cousins in my large family, and when she started forgetting faces she would start calling me her name instead of my own. She still drove her own car for almost a year after developing dementia. Admittedly, I was young teenager during all this, so I probably wasnt fully aware how well - if at all - my family was monitoring her driving abilities, but I do know that there were some suspicious duct taped fixes to her bumper and that she hit
a woman on a bicycle and almost killed her before her keys were taken away for good. She was not charged for the incident, but I’m sure it was on the condition that her license be revoked. Even after having a major pedestrian accident that proved how far gone she was with the reasoning parts of her brain, she could still have days where she’d have full conversations with us and recognized us immediately.
What you need to understand is dementia can be extremely unpredictable and individual to each patient. It’s a disease of the brain, meaning that damage to different parts of the brain will have different effects. The temporal lobe deals with memory, the frontal lobe with intelligence, reasoning, and behavior; and the parietal lobe deals with language. Most people have combinations of damage to some or all of these areas, with more symptoms developing as the brain damage progresses. My grandmother‘s dementia started out with her not having severe memory issues but having major loss of reasoning. This was a major factor for her car accident; she could cognitively understand how to drive her car mechanically and knew generally where things were, but she could not reason why she cant go when she has a red light. Different parts of her brain were working well at the time, but her frontal lobe that dealt with logic and judgement was severely impaired.
This is the last thing I will say about my grandmother to hammer home how the average kiwi will never be able to know Barbs full condition. After her license was revoked, my grandma broke her hip after a fall, and typically going under anesthesia for a major surgery at that age with dementia accelerates the condition exponentially. She got worse fast and before long she was in hospice. My mom spent most of that week with her, and was telling me how far her condition had progressed. She wanted us to see her one last time because we knew she was going to die soon, and warned us that she was nearly unresponsive besides a handful of words and occasionally staring through your soul.
When we got there the next day though, she was was almost 50% present. She was smiling and talking to everyone, though it was obvious how frail and weak she had become. She still got my name wrong at the end and mixed me up with my cousin, but i knew she recognized me when she saw me. Despite how severe her memory issues had become, she was able to form complete sentences most of the time we were there and, in my perspective, seemed like she was doing bounds better than when i had seen her in the weeks after her surgery.
The next day, she died.
Dementia is a scary, confusing, and still relatively misunderstood disease. A person with dementia exhibits symptoms like unpredictable tides, they come and go in intensity and you never know when they’ll flare up or dissipate. I was not that close with my grandmother, but I hope that none of you have to experience something like it with a family member. Seeing someone who was around raising you become a hollow shell of themselves who can’t recognize you anymore is an experience that no one should have to live with.
It fills me with absolute disgust and hatred towards Chris that this rapist piece of shit could look at this woman, who was no doubt exhibiting at least a fraction of these symptoms, and think that she was at all capable of consent or reasoning. For all we know, she could have the same symptoms of dementia my grandmother did and Chris could have taken advantage of her lack of reasoning skills to excuse why fucking her was okay. I can’t see Barb being anything but the victim in this circumstance, even if she was a terrible mom. Chris knew what was going on, was Barbs sole caretaker and saw her symptoms daily, and still committed this heinous series of actions WHILE BRAGGING IN CODE TO OTHERS. The prevelance of certain thinking, memory, or reasoning skills that she may still have are irrelevant because she is already labelled as an individual with cognitive decline.
