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  • Those are very moving photos.
    The last time I saw my step-father was outside the church just after my mother's funeral service. We were driving off to the crematorium and he had been brought outside by one of my uncles to watch the hearse leave. He did not know where he was or what he was watching. In the church he had not known that he was at his wife's funeral. He'd given me a big smile when I walked in, like seeing a long lost friend. Before we had hardly been on speaking terms; he was a difficult man, always not on speaking terms with someone in the family at one time or another. His dementia had strangely robbed him of his animosity.
    So there he was , a tiny, confused old man in a wheelchair watching his late wife leave for the final time, and who because of her own dementia he had not seen in 3 months, before going back to the nursing home where he would die soon after, still not knowing that his wife was dead and asking about her occasionally.
    The fading of their mental faculties was much more painful than their deaths, becoming a parent to your own parent and seeing the real them show up less and less frequently until they are someone you recognise but do not know.

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