I chose this title as a way of illustrating how Jack sees the world. I am not doing this to make fun of him. It is a normal part of dementia which can be exhausting.

Everything is a crisis in Jack’s world. I attribute this to the loss of his inability to…it’s hard to find the right word. Anything that goes missing, whether it’s a button or an important document, is seen as a crisis and reacted to accordingly. Which means…

“Somebody stole it.” Jack declares. This is his usual conclusion. “They came in here when I wasn’t looking and they stole it. I’m never going to get it back. The whole world’s gone crazy!” He sits on the bed, his shoulders slumped, the picture of frustration.” Why does this always happen to me?”

A person without dementia can size up a situation and respond accordingly. But Jack no longer has that ability to size things up. So everything is treated as a full fledged emergency. If I don’t address it quickly enough, his frustration turns to anxiety. If that is unchecked, he panics. If that happens it takes a long time to calm him down. I learned this the hard way. It’s not fun.

Right now our marriage certificate is missing. Jack has been upset about it for two days. I find it baffling that he can forget he’s just eaten, yet he will obsess about something missing for literally days until it’s found. It’s one thing about dementia that I’ll probably never understand. But I digress.

We need the marriage certificate for the VA application, which I should have sent in last week. But I haven’t been able to find it, since Jack put it in one of his safe places. Since one of his ‘safe places’ is the garbage can, I’m a bit worried. But it’s not a catastrophe. All I have to do if I don’t find it is have our old town hall fax me a release, which I will sign and fax back, and then they will mail me a copy and I will send them $20. Or something like that. I talked with an unhelpful lady who said I would have to come in and pick the document up because “we don’t send personal documents through the mail”. So I’m not sure how I will actually get one.

But Jack, true to form, is insisting that “somebody stole it”. They came into the trailer when he wasn’t looking and took it away. Or else someone in the bank took it out of our safe deposit box so they could use it for themselves. I would laugh about the whole thing if I wasn’t busy pulling my hair out.

Anyway. My job for today, according to Jack, is taking apart the trailer to find this document. And I need to do this RIGHT AWAY, before I’ve eaten breakfast or had coffee. This is a real emergency, he says, for the fifteenth time since his eyes opened. We need to drop everything and FIND. THAT. PAPER.

It isn’t a fun way to start the day. But as trying as it is for me, it is much harder for him. I can’t begin to imagine the hell of seeing one’s whole life as a life or death matter.

I take that back—I can. I live with someone who does. And it’s no fun for either of us.