Sort of what happened with my Mum. She's been ill for 20 years due to diabetes and the way it breaks your body down. First she lost her sight, then organ damage, had three different types of cancer including a double mastectomy, lost feeling in her legs etc. Was a slow process. But about 5 years ago she was diagnosed with dementia and that was actually the worst of it. The physical stuff you can handle, even blindness which is really shit tbh. But I described it as like losing 1% of their personality and brain per month. It's a slow and degenerative condition most of the time and in a way, you almost start taking it for granted because you're there often and you only see a very slow thing. Frog/boiling water idea.
There were two major incidents though. About four years ago, she was rushed to hospital from a normal care home with extremely low blood sugar. This might sound dramatic but Mum's blood sugars have been all over the place her entire life and I phoned my first 999 ambulance at about 5 years old so it we knew the drill by now. They stabilise her, spend a few days in there then send her home. Myself and my aunt never believed this was diabetic related because when she woke up, if felt like she had fallen off a cliff mentally, we thought it was a stroke leading to vascular dementia which worsened the condition. Her care home at the time very helpfully refused to take her back when she was in hospital as her needs were "too complex" for them to maange so she was homeless and dumped in a hospital over Xmas which wasn't fun.
We managed to get her into Whittle Hall in Warrington, which is a 5 star hotel masquerading as a dementia specialist care home. Her room was bigger than my first flat and the staff were incredible.
Anyway, in September she had lost control of most of her faculties but there was still a bit of her there and she was lucid enough to hold conversations (well, to listen to them although not remember much of them). She began bleeding and was taken to hospital. While in there, we discovered that she had another form of cancer but to confirm with a biopsy would mean sedating her and there's an extremely high chance that she'd either die on the table or lose brain function to the point of becoming a vegetable, so I spoke to the Docs and decided to send her back home without treatment. The cancer could have taken 3 months or 3 years and she had 0 chance of surviving chemo so better to manage the pain and keep what bit of personality she had. She was in hospital for about 2 weeks and again, she just deteriorated in there rapidly. When she came out, she couldn't feed herself any more and she essentially stopped eating.
And that was basically it until a week ago today where she had a stroke. The care home called me and informed me that she had had a stroke and they wanted to know what I wanted to do about it. Knowing that she despised the hospital and that people that ill are probably not running the marathon after another stroke, I decided to keep her out of hospital and to wait there. She lost the power of speech during the stroke and then a couple of days later she couldn't swallow so we pumped her full of morphine to keep her comfortable and sat around waiting for her to die. She was only actually in a proper vegetative state for about 3 days as she got worse over the week so it could have been a lot lot worse and we're very lucky that she was in a fantastic care home with great staff because there's some amazing people out there who are dying in damp bedsits almost alone and they don't deserve it. Mum landed on her feet in terms of accomodation and care quality and in how quickly the end came all in. Some people stay in that vegetative state for ages because their families refuse to see the situation and pump them full of IV fluids to keep a husk alive. I just wanted her to die, she lost any form of personality, dignity, autonomy, independence, or humanity.
One of the things that it's difficult to remember when you look in the mirror is that you're not looking at yourself. You're looking at the vehicle that you are driving. You can chop your hand off and you're still you because you are not your body and your body is not you. It's a consciousness, the completely and utterly unique collections of pathways in the human brain that no other person who has ever existed or will exist has, that makes up your thoughts, feelings, opinions, your life and consciousness. Spiritual people sometimes call it a soul. The thing that died the other day was the vehicle that my Mum used to drive around in. Perhaps the very last remnants of a "soul" might have been there but it was not her by any meaningful metric of the word "her". The driver departed as the vehicle was still moving, as sometimes happens, the only thing that was left was to let the rest of it go and be thankful that we had the opporunity to say our goodbyes unlike many millions per year whose family are taken quickly, without rhyme or reason.
As far as dementia deaths go, she was on the better side of the averages, again mainly thanks to the staff at Whittle Hall who were incredible with her. My Mum used to be an analyst of the NHS for a while, helping sit on some committees with political staff to help them understand the issues. One of the things she always used to say is that sometimes, people live far too long, we keep them alive well past where they should naturally have passed because our medical science has progressed so much and its one of the drains on the system. I know she wouldn't wanted to take a bed at Whittle, to take the money from the taxpayer, to live as a vegetable. She always made her views on that pretty clear.