NYTimes.com: Learning to Love My Father as His Mind Unraveled

l7pla1w2

This article is free for everyone to read:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/opinion/father-dementia-family.html?unlocked_article_code=1.0E0.jqBS.sBINCeGly_Zg&smid=em-share

Lots of things in the article will resonate with many of us.

The experience of living with my father’s dementia ranged from tragic to
tragicomic to vaudevillian, often within the span of a few minutes.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but dealing with a terminal illness often feels desperately sad — a steady march toward an inevitable demise. It’s easy to feel sorry for yourself, to focus on everything you’re losing. If you’re not careful, it will consume you. Finding a way to revel in the moments of joy or weirdness or humor, however small, was a matter of survival.

Dementia is a degenerative disease which means, essentially, that it works by eroding the brain. This is an oversimplification, but in general the atrophy begins with the inhibitions and control mechanisms. Then it moves deeper, into the hippocampus and frontal lobe, where it starts to eat away at memory: dates, faces, experiences, language. Some things inexplicably hold on longer than others. But eventually, the disease reaches the brainstem. It is at this stage that the body forgets how to perform even the most basic functions: how to chew, how to swallow, how to breathe. This process of erosion happens agonizingly slowly, and still, somehow, far too fast.

l7pla1w2

Sorry. Evidently I don't know how to make the link clickable. Help?

fmb

Thank you for posting this article. A beautiful and honest tribute written with incredible maturity by someone who was barely out of childhood when her father died. Many of the accompanying comments are also rather poignant and are reminiscent of some of the discussions on this board:

"A person with Dementia has lost a good deal and in part has lost a part of themselves. It may not be lost always on the whole, with some parts misplaced here and there to be found another day, only to be misplaced yet again. Whatever has been found for some moment will eventually disappear somewhere into the mists."

Babz0226

I just read the article so touching and true, I just googled the title and it brought me to the article.

fmb

https://alzconnected.org/discussion/comment/212993#Comment_212993

I couldn't make it clickable, either, but I simply copied and pasted it in a new browser window.

harshedbuzz

I find I have the same issue with gifting NYT articles. Hyperlinks end up behind a paywall making the only option pasting the link into a browser.

I read the article yesterday and enjoyed it. I was very impressed by the resilience of this writer in face of such an objectively tragic loss.

HB

midge333

"But the thing about grief is that it’s exhausting. And dementia is nothing if not a test of endurance. People can live with the illness for years, for decades. And over time it wears you down."

The author "gets it".

trottingalong

Beautifully written. Thank you for sharing.