The Withering Brain

Dementia is a sad ending for many of our old. A condition that claims our loved parents and grandparents, confining them to an undignified life inside the husk of what they once was. It remains, in many ways, one of the most cruel ways to die. Slowly, gradually, apathetically, eating away at the fundamental core of the afflicted until they are completely emptied of substance.

The scientists attribute dementia to diseases of different kinds - degenerative brain conditions that quite literally wither the brain tissue away. There is no known cure, as you know, but new medication is constantly tested in efforts to resolve this new epidemic among our aging population. We are still far away from any type of remedy and if the reader has a relative suffering from dementia in the late stages, you deserve to know what is happening.

You must realize that your dementia-riddled relative is LOST. When their condition has developed far enough, you can see it in their glazed eyes. Their gradual descent into fear, forgetfulness and terror is indeed a symptom of a brain in degradation, and after their very being has been hollowed out, something else fills the space that has been freed. Something evil. Something far more worthy of our terror.

So next time you visit your demented relative, staring blankly into nothing, mumbling incoherently and repeating the same things again and again as if a broken record, know that whatever has filled the part of them that is gone can never truly hurt you. Not yet, at least. Not, that is, until the same genetic condition that caused their dementia withers your own brain away.

And over the years, as you yourself are hollowed out, you forget many things but learn but one:

What exactly it was that your senile parent was screaming at.