My mother's dementia is becoming more and more prominent. The last couple of weeks she has been fixated on an early childhood friend, Buddy McQuat. He died at an early age from measels, obviously my mother survived. It seems she has been suffering from a deep seated guilt about that and it is now plaguing her. I had heard the story many times from many years before she had any indication of dementia. Her mother was Christian Science, her father was not. She and Buddy both caught the measels and I've gotten some hints that she believes he got it from her. Anyway, her father took her to the doctor but his parents, after reportedly listening to her mother, did not. I don't know what a doctor, in those days, would have done for measels, as a vaccine would not be available yet for many years. But, it's in her mind that he died because he did not see a doctor for treatment.

Several times now I've found her weeping over her long lost childhood friend. She tells me they had a pact to marry. She ponders over what he might have become. Today she made the comment that sometimes she thinks I am him. This is not as strange as it might appear. She has long been a believer in the possibility of reincarnation. On other occasions, some pre-dementia, she has remarked that she recognized me at the time I was born but did not know who I had been. Deja vue of a sort.