Insights into Dementia

These two recent posts tell personal stories of adult children caring for a parent with dementia. First, a blogger at Daily Kos shares how her and two of her sisters came together to care for their parents. The mother has dementia, but they did not realize the extent the disease was impacting her until their father died. She writes about the strain of caregiving, even with an extensive support system in place.

In the second, from the new Happy Days blog in The New York Times, Elizabeth Kadetsky writes about how her mother's diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease is changing her.

Today, at 69, she has less of that charisma — she has been diagnosed with the disease in its early to middle stages. But she has at least as much of a quality that I, earlier, modeled myself on, and later came to admire in her: a quirky, rather peculiar nature that could be summarized as an insistence on living in the moment. By concentrated meditation on the moment and each moment that follows, the yogi gains sacred knowledge. So these days, I sometimes believe I am not so much losing my mother as communicating, more and more so exclusively, with that side of her that exists only in the present.