User blog comment:Gideoncrawle/Another World War II Veteran Down/@comment-1844926-20161121050113/@comment-1874924-20161121062138

Speaking of strokes, my father had several TIAs (transitory ischemic attacks, a.k.a. mini-strokes) in his later years, and that's a known risk factor for vascular dementia.

As I mentioned, he was a WWII veteran. He served in the Pacific theater with Marines, although he never saw action. The closest he got to the front was garrison duty on Saipan, in the Northern Marianas Islands. While stationed there, he found an unfired Japanese pistol cartridge, which he brought home as a souvenir. He spent a lot of nights on sentry duty, sitting on cold rocks, and he blamed that for his prostate problems later in life. He was a private for most of his tour, but they made him a corporal the day they discharged him. He received a medical discharge after contracting rheumatic fever.

His experiences in the service also left him with a severe aversion to hot foods that were inadequately heated. He had no problem with foods meant to be chilled or served at room temperature; but if it was supposed to be served hot, then it had damn well better be piping hot. On many a night, my mother would bring in dinner fresh off the stove or out of the oven, on a preheated plate, only to see him take one bite and nuke his plate for 30 seconds.

Your grandmother's distorted time perception probably stemmed from damaged "episodic memory", i.e. memory of events. Hers sounds worse in that regard than my father's, since he understood that his long-term memory had big gaps in it.

I haven't felt as affected by my father's passing as I would if it had been my mother, for a couple of reasons. First, we had a lot of time to prepare; and in a sense, he effectively died a couple of years ago, with Thursday's event just making it official, so to speak. Second, my contact with him was limited after I moved out, although I live close by. I generally saw him only a few times a year, mostly at family gatherings. It's my mother whom I see regularly, as she often visits on Staturdays after doing her business at her bank, which is about three blocks from my home.