Loving Someone With Dementia Quotes

When you truly love someone, it doesn't go away,

I am a wife, mother, and friend, and soon to be grandmother, I still feel, understand, and am worthy of the love and joy in those relationships. I am still an active participant in society. My brain no longer works well, but I use my ears for unconditional listening, my shoulders for crying on, and my arms for hugging others with dementia. Through an early stage support group...by talking to you today, I am helping others with dementia live better with dementia. I am not someone dying. I am someone living with Alzheimer's. I want to do that as well as I possibly can.

What made Olive the saddest about the Gardners was that everyone wanted to be enshrined in someone’s memory. It was the only way of living on after death, really: in the minds of loved ones. Memories were the only things that made aging bearable, a way of reverting to better, simpler days.

A daughter’s decree to Lewy body It was then that you carried me, throughout the whole of my life, keeping me safe and away from all strife. And now that you struggle with everyday things, I’ll make sure your safe from the pain that life brings. And now that your quality and love of life’s gone, I’ll get you the best from each day till you’re done. And as people wonder and as people stare, as you’re talking to things that just are not there. I will stand beside you and I’ll make them see, if it’s real to you, then it’s real to me. And the times that you stumble, the times that you fall, I’ll make sure there’s someone to answer your call. And when you are dizzy, scared and alone, I’ll make sure that kindness and compassion is shown. When I recently asked you what life had been? you looked at me sadly and said ordinary. But I will make sure though the best of you’s gone, that together we create a legacy that’s strong. So as comprehension is the last thing to go, I hope you can hear me, I pray that you know, It is now that I carry you.

What is it that makes a person the very person that she is, herself alone and not another, an integrity of identity that persists over time, undergoing changes and yet still continuing to be—until she does not continue any longer, at least not unproblematically? I stare at the picture of a small child at a summer’s picnic, clutching her big sister’s hand with one tiny hand while in the other she has a precarious hold on a big slice of watermelon that she appears to be struggling to have intersect with the small o of her mouth. That child is me. But why is she me? I have no memory at all of that summer’s day, no privileged knowledge of whether that child succeeded in getting the watermelon into her mouth. It’s true that a smooth series of contiguous physical events can be traced from her body to mine, so that we would want to say that her body is mine; and perhaps bodily identity is all that our personal identity consists in. But bodily persistence over time, too, presents philosophical dilemmas. The series of contiguous physical events has rendered the child’s body so different from the one I glance down on at this moment; the very atoms that composed her body no longer compose mine. And if our bodies are dissimilar, our points of view are even more so. Mine would be as inaccessible to her—just let her try to figure out [Spinoza’s] Ethics—as hers is now to me. Her thought processes, prelinguistic, would largely elude me. Yet she is me, that tiny determined thing in the frilly white pinafore. She has continued to exist, survived her childhood illnesses, the near-drowning in a rip current on Rockaway Beach at the age of twelve, other dramas. There are presumably adventures that she—that is that I—can’t undergo and still continue to be herself. Would I then be someone else or would I just no longer be? Were I to lose all sense of myself—were schizophrenia or demonic possession, a coma or progressive dementia to remove me from myself—would it be I who would be undergoing those trials, or would I have quit the premises? Would there then be someone else, or would there be no one? Is death one of those adventures from which I can’t emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists. A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? In this passage from Betraying Spinoza, the philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (to whom I am married) explains the philosophical puzzle of personal identity, one of the problems that engaged the Dutch-Jewish thinker who is the subject of her book.5 Like her fellow humanist Dawkins, Goldstein analyzes the vertiginous enigma of existence and death, but their styles could not be more different—a reminder of the diverse ways that the resources of language can be deployed to illuminate a topic.

I really don't think that's true at all. If you truly love someone, if they were ever important to you, it doesn't disappear. What it looks like might change, but that's only the surface.

The fear brought on by a loved one’s dementia diagnosis is staggering. We’re on a bus ride down a congested street, and there’s no driver at the wheel. Here’s where we say that if you aren’t freaking out, you clearly don’t understand the situation. The future looms large. The most dire scenes play through our minds. We hardly know where to start. Much of our fear comes from feeling like we’re totally unprepared to take on the task ahead. Most of the time, we are totally unprepared. Have you ever watched someone else walk through dementia caregiving? Probably not.

The losses caused by dementia aren’t as clear as a loss by death. When someone dies, we know when it happened. We know how it happened. We take part in certain rituals to mark the event. Our sorrow is understood by others who offer condolences and support. Those things don’t happen with the slow but inevitable losses of dementia. What we experience is called ambiguous loss. Ambiguous loss and the subsequent grief can come from two scenarios. Either someone is physically absent but emotionally present or they’re physically present but emotionally absent. They’re here, but they aren’t here.

When someone you love has dementia, you too experience a form of anticipatory grief, but yours may extend over a longer period of time (for some, as long as 20 years) and be socially unrecognized and surrounded by uncertainty.

Part 3 takes a look at the challenges of diagnosing and treating brain diseases. What should you do if you notice the early signs? Are they symptoms of another health condition that mimics dementia? Why have our research and clinical trials failed so miserably in coming up with cures and drugs to treat neurodegenerative ailments? What treatments are available at all levels of severity? How can a spouse remain healthy while caring for a partner with dementia (caregivers have a much higher risk of developing the disease)? Dementia is a moving target; caring for someone with the disease can be one of the most challenging jobs ever undertaken. No one learns in formal schooling how to deal with a loved one whose brain is in irreversible decline. For some, the brain changes are slow and subtle, taking years or even more than a decade for symptoms to become pronounced; for others, it’s sudden and rapid. Both circumstances can be difficult and unpredictable

Minimize the fear of caring for someone with dementia, and preserve the caregiver’s sanity with personal, functional tips to understand and cope with the disease.