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Articles

The Years That Dementia Has Eaten

March 08, 2025 by Matthew Allen

Dementia

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If I were the superstitious kind, I might say that odd-numbered years were unlucky for my wee family: we lost an uncle in 2021; we lost a grandad in 2023; we lost an auntie in 2025. Auntie Ann, who passed away back in January, had been living with dementia for most of the decade prior to her death.

It’s a time of complicated emotions when a loved one with a chronic illness, like our late Auntie Ann, dies; you feel a sense of relief to know they’re at peace but sad that in order to see them again you will now have to wait until the next life.

In the car, on the way home from Auntie Ann’s funeral service (in the rural parish church that she loved), I thought of a passage from the Book of Joel: ‘I will restore to you the years which the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter’ (Joel 2.25, RSV). I thought, as well, of all those precious years that Auntie Ann’s dementia, the ‘swarming locust’ of the mind, had ‘eaten’.

According to Dementia UK, there are several hundred subtypes of dementia. Given how the locust appears in several guises, I feel the creature is a fitting symbol for the condition. Joel, in his prophecy, names different species in the locust family: ‘the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter’, in the newer translations (ESV; RSV); ‘the cankerworm, the caterpillar, and the palmerworm’, in the older ones (Geneva Bible; KJV). Death, we learnt in Game of Thrones, is a ‘Many-Faced God’; its crony, dementia, wears many faces, too.

I don’t have a medical background. I don’t claim to have a scientific understanding of dementia. But I’ve seen its effects. Joel’s words are impactful for me, then, due to the phrase, ‘I will restore to you the years…’, which will resonate deeply with anyone who, having seen a loved one suffer with dementia, has wished for a way to reverse this awful disease.

Because, as we learn from the cast of Rent, a year isn’t just a unit of time, comprised of hours, weeks and months; each is made up not of ‘five hundred, twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes’ but rather of ‘five hundred twenty-five thousand moments so dear’.

Originally, the phrase, ‘I will restore to you the years…’, was a promise that God would send a bumper harvest of ‘grain, wine, and oil’ (Joel 2.19) as compensation for the crops that armies of locusts had once destroyed. It’s concerned with agriculture, but it offers hope to both ‘culchies’ and ‘townies’ (Irishisms…) because our God makes all things new (Revelation 21.5).

One day, those we love will be fully restored. ‘I consider that the sufferings of this present time’, St Paul – who, doubtless, knew people with dementia – tells us, ‘are not worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed to us’ (Romans 8.18).

It’s becoming a trope in Broadway musicals that a character poignantly revisits photos from their past (“Everything I Know”, In the Heights; “Better Than Before”, Next to Normal). I like to think that’s what happens when our loved ones with dementia go to heaven. It’s nice to believe that God, rather than instantly zap their memories back into place, opens an album filled with joyful scenes; and all the happiness they contain is experienced once again.

When the photo book is closed, and the long-awaited hugs are given, what happens next? Eternity will then stretch out before us, filled with new memories to be made: ‘You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God’ (Joel 2.26).

Christians don’t just hope that ‘all shall be well’; we believe it with our whole hearts, for ‘the life of the world to come’ (found in the Nicene Creed) is a crucial part of our doctrine.

Our minds, in heaven, will not be laid open to ‘the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter’ – the ‘Many-Faced God’ we call dementia – ‘neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away’ (Revelation 21.4); these ‘former things’ are the body’s decline, culminating in death, and the great sadness this brings us.

Paul reassures us that we won’t languish in the grave indefinitely but will receive a new body from Our Lord, ‘who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body’ (Philippians 3.21).

Christ, whose ‘glorious body’ we will inherit, recognised his friends – Mary Magdalene, famously (Luke 24.1-12), but also his Disciples (Luke 24.36-49) – post-Resurrection; and so, there is hope that we, like Jesus, will be able to pick up our earthly relationships where we left off.

Lent is a time for looking ahead in the hope of new life. Yes, we must witness the horrors of Good Friday (dementia, tragically, spreads Good Friday levels of mental anguish over long, long years of a person’s life) but a glorious resurrection awaits on the other side.

These are themes that will mean so much more to me this year, given our loss of Auntie Ann. That’s the benefit of a church calendar that repeats itself; life moves on, and you see the liturgy from different perspectives, depending on what you’re going through that year.

And so, particularly for those who have been bereaved recently, may Lent offer you something to hold on to when the nights are dark. Easter is coming; and, with it, new life.

3/8/2025 9:50:24 PM

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About Matthew Allen

Matthew Allen is a writer and musician based in Northern Ireland. He is a graduate of Queen’s University, Belfast, where he studied Theology and Liberal Arts.

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