A daughter has penned a heartbreaking letter to her father as he loses his memory, admitting it’s time he joins his late wife rather than continue to battle ailing health.
In a startlingly honest open message, she admits she often wonders if her beloved father would want to be “put out of his misery”, but feels unable to step in to help.
Pleading for answers over why he’s not been allowed to join his late wife, she asks The Guardian newspaper if it’s time he leaves this world to join her mother, in what appears to be her blessing and a moving goodbye.
“Sometimes you think I am Mum, who died when she was roughly the age I am now,” she writes, while revealing her father often grows confused when they look through family albums together – not remembering his daughter’s wedding or kids.
She reveals her father often asks if she’s doing okay for money, and admits he’d be “horrified” if he knew what was being spent on his nursing home fees.
After two years in the home, he can no longer remember the house they sold to fund his care, and now faces walking problems as well as potential infections in the future.
“I wonder what you would have said if you had known that your final years would be spent like this,” she added. “Would you have begged to be put out of your misery? I couldn’t do it, so I couldn’t ask the doctor to do it either. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is ingrained in me.
“But it doesn’t stop me feeling angry that God has not let you be with your beloved wife before now.”
Remembering a time when her father told her about how he had met her mother, the writer goes on to say she had “drawn” him to her – before asking: “Isn’t it time she did that again?”
It’s no doubt a letter many families will relate to. According to Health Direct, there are thought to be more than 400,000 people in Australia suffering from dementia. Meanwhile, around 1.2million Aussies are involved in caring for someone with the life-altering condition.