Seeing famous actors e.g. Robin Williams, and Bruce Willis suffering from dementia made me wonder in later stages do the people still aware of death? We all know death because we know the process we learn from or it’s just that we instinctively aware of it?
Yeah, I knew he was probably “lucky” with the particular ways in which his brain was being destroyed by the cancer - he was obviously falling apart from my perspective as an outside observer, but from his perspective he wasn’t really noticing most of the stuff that was going wrong. He knew something was amiss, of course, but the only thing that really seemed to be bothering him was his inability to use his left arm correctly (another area of his brain that was failing due to the combination of surgeries and tumor and radiotherapy). He was very fastidious about doing physiotherapy exercises for it, which gave him a sense of “fighting back” I guess. He didn’t seem to comprehend the futility of it and we certainly weren’t going to try explaining it to him.
In the end, I’m satisfied that I was able to ensure that his final months went by in comfortable and familiar surroundings, with his family members around him providing security. He seemed to recognize us right up to the last days. There are a lot of worse ways to go.