Counting marbles

Still wrestling with how I feel about my father's decline into incoherent semi-silence. I suspect that HS captured the essence quite well:

Unless one is a sociopath, seeing someone deteriorate, mentally or physically, is shocking and upsetting, no matter your prior relationship with that person. I think these feelings spring principally from a feeling of helplessness: "I want to restore them so that I can go back to disliking the person they were, but I can't. I want to restore them because it's hard on everyone to see them like this, but I can't. I want to restore them because this just isn't fair! But I can't."

Certainly, feeling helpless is a big part of it. Damn it, I'm a lawyer – there's got to be someone I can sue for this!

At the same time, this is my mother's husband, and – having looked after him for the last 40-odd years – she is the one who gets to call the shots around litigation and also treatment. She doesn't believe that fault would be clearly enough attributable for a suit to succeed (or at be worth the wrangling). Further medical investigation also seems fruitless as there are so many other health problems present, that even were there a cure for the mental decline, Dad would be no where near healthy and happy again.

Still and all, the speed of his decline has me freaked. Yes, he has been loosing marbles pretty steadily over the last four or five years. But slowly, almost imperceptibly. He certainly had most of them left at the beginning of December. If I had to put a number to it, I'd say that he was at about 80-85% of a full collection. Now? Well we're not sure what all is going on inside, but from what's apparent outside, I'd say that he's down to his last ten or fifteen. It's been a huge decline over the month. I've really no clue what happens when the last marble rolls away.