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The Year That Can Respectfully Get Fucked
2013 was a shock. My dad, Superman, the man who would live forever…would not.
I was thirty when I realized he wasn’t actually Superman.
Something was up.
One day, out of the blue, my dad fell asleep while he was driving to work. We were worried, as we had noticed he had been forgetting things often. But he was young, and for a while, we assumed he was just stressed.
Then, he began to act even weirder. He would forget how to do simple everyday tasks and get into arguments at work. He would repeat things he had said mere moments before and then act bewildered when we told him he had just said them.
We made the guy who never went to the doctor go to the doctor. The diagnosis came back, and it wasn’t good. He had Picks disease or frontotemporal dementia. It’s a rare type of dementia affecting the frontal lobe, and it can be fast-moving and intense. We were told he probably had about two years, five years at best. But to make it five years would be awful.
The doctor told us he would lose the ability to eat, drink, and swallow. He would forget how to perform everyday functions such as urinating. He would likely act inappropriately and lose the ability to understand social cues.
