Tag: dementia

“Shawn says Jo asked him to promise he would never let him go into a nursing home, that he would help him find some way to end his life on his own terms.”

A meditation on the nature of grief, at a time when the whole world seems to be grieving.

Dementia is a kind of erasure, a death before death, where the living discount the infirmed long before they’re gone.

Winston Ross recalls the heartbreaking ordeal his family endured after his mother’s routine surgery led to post-operative delirium.

Peering into the mirror of her mother, Marcia Aldrich wonders whether she too is sentenced to dementia.

A dementia patient’s daughter begins to question her own grasp on reality.

George Andrie’s daughter, Mary Brooks, is speaking out against the NFL’s slipshod settlement claims process.

Kevin Sampsell bears witness to the ways in which Alzheimer’s has been pulling his mother back in time, and taking over her life.

Kate Axelrod reflects on the last days of her grandmother’s life, and witnessing as her grandfather’s own decline helped him to survive losing his wife of 66 years.

Lost too often in the discussion about a cure has been a much more basic, more immediate, and in many ways more important question: How can we better care for those who suffer from the disease? Dementia comes with staggering economic consequences, but it’s not the drugs or medical interventions that have the biggest price […]

Adapted from Witchel’s forthcoming memoir All Gone. A daughter adjusts after her mother develops stroke-related dementia: Mom faced me. ‘I want you to kill me,’ she said solemnly. For decades, she insisted that if she was mentally compromised in any way, her children were to pull the plug. But the situations we’d imagined never included […]

A woman watched her husband’s behavior change dramatically—so much so she even considered divorce. He was eventually diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, a rare and frequently misdiagnosed brain disease that affects personality and language skills: Looking back, Mrs. French, who is 66 and lives in Manhattan, recalled episodes of odd behavior over the years and realized […]