Where we are in the Joe Biden-Donald Trump presidential race has me thinking of my grandfather, whose final years were riddled by dementia.
His situation reminds me more of what I see with Biden, a mix of moments of youthful vigor, absolute clarity and confusion, than Trump, who comes across as confused in a perpetually paranoid, loud, angry way.
With my grandfather, fortunately, even the bad moments were fine.
The times that he thought I was one of his kids, and it was the 1940s and 1950s, were actually endearing, because he’d go into stories that I’d never heard, for instance, the ones about baseball games on Sundays in Philadelphia with the A’s and New York Yankees, and wasn’t it funny that the Yankees win all those World Series, but the A’s won two out of three that weekend.
I’m a baseball history nut, so him taking me to the scene of games with Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, man, that was awesome, getting those first-hand accounts.
As his dementia worsened, I read up on what we could expect, and came to realize that we were lucky, because the confusion that comes with it often leads to frustration and anger over not remembering things, not knowing what’s going on, not knowing who the people are around you, and leads to increasing spells of lashing out at everybody around.
The good moments were the ones when he was all there, but we had fewer of those as the years went on.
This is where we are as a country.
We’ve given ourselves a choice for who will lead us for the next four years between one guy who has good moments, but we know where things are headed there, because there will be fewer of those good moments going forward, and a second guy who is frustrated, and lashes out at everybody as a result, and we know where things are headed there as well, because there are going to be more and more of those moments going forward.
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Chris Graham
