This is the 81st instalment in a series on dementiaincluding the research into its causes and treatment, advice for carers, and stories of hope.
My mother often used to wonder whether she was on a ship. As we gazed across the lawn at home, she would ask, “Am I on a ship?”
Sometimes it was her first question when she woke in the morning.
“Is this my cabin?” she would ask as she looked around her. “I used to share it with somebody. I wonder where she’s gone.”
Or: “Will we dock soon?”
I used to think her “ship” was a stuck memory of childhood; she often travelled with her family by sea, between India and Ireland, later from Cape Town, in South Africa, to Italy. Dementia erases more recent memories first; the last oldest stick longest. Is that why she was imagining she was aboard a “ship”?
I have learned since she died that, in referencing her “ship”, she may have been trying to communicate something of how she felt to me.
