You start with one minute, one hour, one day at a time.
The closeness you had with the person drives how you feel and respond to the changes in them.
My nephew received a brain shunt when he was 6 to drain excess fluid off the brain. When he was in college the shunt failed. Several surgeries later, he spent a year on disability and had therapy at a local brain injury therapy center. He still doesn’t have certain memories, and most certainly doesn’t have certain behaviors. For the most part he is still an okay person, but the amount of niceness has fallen. These surgeries interrupted his development and re-set him to his teenage years, though he was twenty. Each shunt failure that required surgery had that effect. He’s now 28, has been out of college since December, and is making as much of his life as he can. He’s still verbally abusive of his mom, never responds to phone calls and that’s life from his point of view, tough to the rest of us.
I work with a lady whose husband suffered a brain injury that put him back to age 12 or 13. It has been incredibly hard for her to adjust to the fact that her retired Navy husband of 40 odd years now behaves like a teenager and she has been frustrated, disheartened, in tears, stubborn and self-sufficient, on any given day for much of the past five years.
This is what we’ve both learned:
You deal with what you can, seek comfort and support from your friends, family and therapists and in taking responsibility for financial and legal matters see your tax accountant and family lawyer as much as necessary. It sucks, but some days are better than others and eventually the equilibrium of routine may be achieved.