False memories

A friend said yesterday that one of the things she misses is being able to have any sort of meaningful conversation with her husband who has dementia.  I agreed with this but realised many hours later (ie today) that Ash was never one for real meaningful conversations, he was just happy to enjoy life and go with the flow.  He liked, sometimes, to discuss plans for the future but never too far ahead and would much rather enjoy what we had and what we were doing already rather than talk about something which was in the future and might never happen.  On reflection I think now that what I'm missing is a perfect world which never actually existed.   In that ideal existence the sun always shone, we never argued, I was slim and we had deep and meaningful conversations.  Real life isn't like that.  Over the past few months I have lowered my expectations and am starting to settle for what we have (which is still pretty good) rather than what I would like.  For instance I would like to be 5'6" and a size 12 but (unless someone works out how to stretch me 4 inches) that's definitely not going to happen; I would like this thing called dementia to disappear but that isn't going to happen;  I would like to win the lottery but that's unlikely happen (although there's always a chance).  More than anything I would like to turn the clock back so that things are as they used to be only I would have the chance to avoid all the mistakes we made along the way.  However life isn't perfect and we need to make the most of what we've got.  I found a quote today which said 'Change your thoughts and you change your world'.  This will be my mantra at least until I find an even more positive one.

if you too are going through something similar and want to get in touch email me at memoryfortwo@gmail.com.