Bob's family was horrified at the idea that his relationship with Dorothy might have become sexual. At his age, they wouldn't have thought it possible. But when Bob's son walked in and saw his dad's 82-year-old girlfriend performing oral sex on his 95-year-old father last December, incredulity turned into full-blown panic. "I didn't know where this was going to end," said the manager of the assisted-living facility where Bob and Dorothy lived. "It was pretty volatile."
Because both Bob and Dorothy suffer from dementia, the son assumed that his father didn't fully understand what was going on. And his sputtering cell phone call reporting the scene he'd happened upon would have been funny, the manager said, if the consequences hadn't been so serious. "He was going, 'She had her mouth on my dad's penis! And it's not even clean!' " Bob's son became determined to keep the two apart and asked the facility's staff to ensure that they were never left alone together.
Hmm, sounds like this is more a problem for the son than for the father....
After that, Dorothy stopped eating. She lost 21 pounds, was treated for depression, and was hospitalized for dehydration. When Bob was finally moved out of the facility in January, she sat in the window for weeks waiting for him. She doesn't do that anymore, though: "Her Alzheimer's is protecting her at this point," says her doctor, who thinks the loss might have killed her if its memory hadn't faded so...
We have lots of strange ideas about sex in our culture, but one of the most pernicious is this idea that old people don't want to "do it" anymore. It's one of our most basic and natural biological urges, and to expect elderly persons living in close contact not to have any kind of sexual response to one another is simply ridiculous.
My feeling: the two patients were making the best of the final years (months? weeks?) of their lives, and if that means violating their kids' sense of propriety or inconveniencing a nursing home worker or two, so be it. The solaces and comforts of advanced dementia are few and far enough between as it is; for some moral busybody to remove a very real (if ultimately temporary and fleeting) source of loving embraces (and, yes, sexual release) is to visit an evil on the world.
Yeah, dude, an old woman put your dad's cock in her mouth. Just hope that you're so lucky if and when you get to be that age.
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