Seeing My Father Vulnerable With Dementia Made Me Notice Vulnerability Everywhere
For many decades, those living with dementia have been absent people in our society
We are all trapped by the limits of our mind. It’s not possible to see the world we live in, only minute, shuttered portions of it where the beam of our attention falls. When I was a teenager, I noticed other teenagers. Pregnant, I suddenly saw all the pregnant women, then the babies, and then the world was full of small children and their exhausted parents, full of single mothers. Now I see countless people who are frail and scared — but that’s only because I saw my father, sick with dementia, so frail and so scared.
We can’t see everything, but perhaps we can learn to be more aware of just how blind we are and make some kind of amends. A few years ago, when I was working on a novel called Missing Persons, I spent weeks wandering around London, suddenly seeing what had always been there: the figures under the arches, the people huddled in doorways, in Underground stations, on benches, in makeshift tents, pushing supermarket trolleys filled with plastic bags of tatty possessions, holding out cardboard signs saying “Help Me,” old beyond their years. The homeless and the dispossessed, who have fallen through every safety net, remind us of what…
