Picture from Pxfuel, CC Public Domain Certification. Translated from Ukrainian by Svitlana Bregman This story is part of a series of essays and articles written by Ukrainian artists who decided to stay inside Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. This series is produced in collaboration with the Folkowisko Association/Rozstaje.art, thanks to co-funding by the governments of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia through a grant from the International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe. “Do you know what dementia is?” Olga, a Ukrainian woman who has been caring for her ill mother, begins a story. “This disease is completely irrational: everything you imagine about a person or about how the human brain works can simply be deleted.” “Almost a decade of my mother's disease has changed my worldview,” she says. “The psychiatrist said, ‘Hide the TV because the patient will destroy it.’ I said, ‘No, but why?’ After some time, though, my mum began to quarrel with her reflection in the mirror and she destroyed the TV in the house. At some point, I realized my mother's long-term memory was disappearing, the present seemed to vanish, and she was gradually returning to her childhood. My mom kept saying she wanted to go home even though she was in the apartment where she had always lived. In her head, she was back in her youth, before Kyiv. As for me, her only daughter, I ⁠also fell out of her life — I had not been born yet. But she knew my name and kept calling for me, even though she couldn’t explain who I was.” In the beginning, Olga's mother understood her condition and asked for help. Her lack of control scared her: she could not read, write, or understand what time it was. She forgot words. She said she would jump off a bridge if she could. “I ⁠think my mother was telling the truth, but she dared not do it,” Olga said in reference to her mother's words. “Once, at Trinity, we stayed at a country cottage near Kyiv, and we failed to watch the door of the house. My mother went outside and exited the garden into the forest. Fortunately, she was barefoot. It took us some three hours to find her. The footprints on the sand helped us… Maybe she didn’t want us to find her in those woods.” Olga keeps repeating that society should have more awareness about this disease. “In the past, at Lublin University, I took several lectures on euthanasia and could not understand why there was so much fuss about it. As my mother's illness progressed, I returned to the issue of euthanasia and reconsidered it in the context of dementia: a person should have the right to choose.” When Olga was pregnant with her second child (her children are five and seven), she debated whether she should place her mother in an assisted living facility so that she could focus on her two young children. As it turned out, Kyiv no longer had any such wards in psychiatric hospitals or nursing homes. No one wants dementia patients because they are incurable, and the disease keeps progressing. Their care is hard to manage. They found a ward for dementia patients in the suburbs with a long waiting list, but there were only seven nurses for 80 people. The psychiatrist said, “You can take her there, but she will only survive three months at the most. It’s your decision … If you want to ‘get rid of’ her,’ I can help you arrange it. But such patients feel better with the family.” That is why, two months before the birth of her grandson, Olga's mother was taken to the Vinnytsia region in Ukraine to stay with a caregiver. “She did not want to be touched by strangers when getting dressed or during hygiene routines. My mother, who has never used any obscene language in her life, would sometimes curse at our nanny in a harsh way. She pushed her away. She spat on her.” In the Vinnytsia region, she fell down six months after she arrived and broke her hip. The doctors refused to perform surgery to fix it, either there or in Kyiv. This is a common practice. If dementia patients get injured, many doctors won't treat them, meaning their bones fuse and the person becomes unable to walk. Doctors believe that such persons are not lucid and that they cannot be responsible for the intensive rehabilitative process required after surgery. In addition, there is a high risk of re-injury. A few days after the fall, in May 2018, Olga's mother was transported to Kyiv. She realized that she was back home and was happy to see her grandchildren.