BY KCY

Tonight, I watched the first episode of And Just Like That, the long awaited follow up to the hit show Sex and the City. If you were a woman reaching adulthood or in early adulthood, or, heck, just a woman in the late 1990s and early 2000s, you were, like me, obsessed with this show. It was a show of pipe dreams. A woman living her best single life in the most exciting city in the world with the closest girlfriends, doing it all in the most fabulous wardrobe. We all wanted to be a Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, Samantha. It was a show about sex, love, friendship with witty banter and smart writing.

I used to watch the show with my mom’s partner, Bob. Bob and I have completely different tastes in shows. He’s all about the old westerns, not the fun and flirty. But Sex and the City was the one show, we enjoyed watching together. He loved the dialogue.

I didn’t watch the first episode of And Just Like That with Bob tonight, because just like the characters on the show who now have gray hair, crow’s feet and hearing aids, Bob has aged.

Bob has dementia and is in a care home now. Sometimes he recognizes me (or pretends to) and sometimes he doesn’t. Even if he wanted to watch TV, he wouldn’t know how to turn on the TV because he doesn’t know what a remote control is. He spends his days in a wheelchair, then in bed, where every day is like Groundhog Day (Bill Murray was great in that movie!). Don’t get me wrong, the home he lives in is lovely and the people there take excellent care of him, but this thing called dementia is a beast. He has the type that Robin Williams allegedly was developing before he tragically took his own life. This beast, this dementia takes the light out of one’s eyes. It’s devastating because there’s no cure. There’s no medication to slow it down. All one can do is watch, as it ravages his brain, as it takes away the man I once knew.

It started slowly. We thought he was just getting older, having that normal memory loss. A forgetting of the keys here. A forgetting of how to get somewhere with progression to forgetting what a microwave was and did. The doctors saw it before us. In retrospect, Bob probably pretended to remember or know things or recognize people, when he really didn’t. There was a lot of denial from him and from us in the beginning. But as he progressed more, including having problems with his balance, it became clear that this wasn’t going away. Bob would become one of those people who wore a diaper, needed to be restrained for his own safety, needed to be redirected repeatedly. Someone who would pee on the floor, not wear clothes. Someone, we didn’t recognize ourselves.

No one ever thinks they will have a loved one with this type of dementia, or, that it will be them. But it’s just one of those things. We can do all the sudoku and crossword puzzles we want, but sometimes it’s just not enough.

I’m furious dementia has held Bob’s memory captive like a lion with bloody prey in his mouth. Because just like that, it’s stolen my Sex and the City partner.