"I always knew from the time I met him that your father was nuts."
My companion, who had met my father the previous year, said this sentence to me as we were discussing my Dad's recent diagnosis with early-onset Alzheimer's disease. I was 20 years old.
Nuts. I felt punched in the stomach when he used this word. When I remember the conversation years later, I still do.
I got the same feeling when I read Lauren Fetten's article "How Should We Talk About Dementia? Choosing Better Terminology" on the Being Patient website. When I read that some people with dementia were called "feeders" if they needed help with dining, my stomach sank in the same way.
The language reduces the people with dementia to a dismissive slang term or an activity they have difficulty with. And to their families and friends, they are so much more than that. Like my wonderful Dad, in this photo. (Yesterday would have been his 96th birthday.)
I've heard others push back on using compassionate language, saying it's too difficult, or too politically correct, or not important. I have a feeling my companion years ago would have told me that I was being too sensitive.
But that fact that my stomach still drops shows me that the compassion in language does matter, and I can't be the only one who feels this way.
Comments