Best 69 quotes in «dementia quotes» category

When you objectify a person living with dementia, you dehumanize them. Once dehumanized, the person becomes a villain.

There will be many cases when researchers will need to look at data to come closer to a cure, in maybe five years, 10 years, 15 years. We can help make that data analysis easier. We can't let this wait. Dementia has potential to cripple our economy.

Age isn't stealing from my grandmother; it's slowly unwinding her.

As a child, my aunt Olive had a friend Who was invisible to others. Topsy lived at the back of the garden. That this was just her imagination Olive always strenuously denied. And when she developed dementia many years later Topsy again faithfully kept her company. (From: Kinderpraat)

And sometimes when she does remember, she calls me her little angel and she knows where she is and everything is all right for a second or a minute and then we cry; she for the life that she lost I for the woman I only know about through the stories of her children.

And while a bald head and a looped ribbon were seen as badges of courage and hope, her reluctant vocabulary and vanishing memories advertised mental instability and impending insanity. Those with cancer could expect to be supported by their community. Alice expected to be an outcast.

A PET scan of his brain activity showed diminished capacity on the left side of his brain, hence, planning ahead, strategic thinking is harmed. A positive is that he is less critical of things. He has lost language and gained singing... THAT makes for more fun. What amazes me is that so many times he returns and talks and seems to think like he used to. His voice and laugh returns to normal. How can that be???

By loving you more, you love the person you are caring for more.

Caregiving will never be one-size-fits-all.

Dementia: Is it more painful to forget, or to be forgotten?

Dementia. Ruth puzzled over the diagnosis: How could such a beautiful-sounding word apply to such a destructive disease? It was a name befitting a goddess: Dementia, who caused her sister Demeter to forget to turn winter into spring.

Foto's zien is iets anders dan foto's kijken,' zeg ik. 'Iedereen kan foto's kijken maar een foto zien betekent dat je hem kunt lezen. Aan de ene kant heb je mensen en hun culturele voortbrengselen, aan de andere kant heb je de natuur. Bomen, meren, wolkenluchten spreken op foto's een algemene voor iedereen verstaanbare taal. Buiten de tijd om als het ware. Mensen, bouwwerken, wegen en koffiebussen daarentegen kunnen alleen gelezen worden in een bepaalde context, in de tijd, worden gelezen. U kunt dat fotoalbum op tafel voor het grootste deel niet lezen omdat u de noodzakelijke achtergrondinformatie mist. U was er niet bij. U kunt zich er met andere woorden niets bij voorstellen omdat u zich niet herinneren kunt wat eens echt te zien was. Het is uw verleden niet.

Een geboorte of een huwelijk mag dan een belangrijke gebeurtenis zijn, maar het garandeert geen plaats in het geheugen.' De hersens, een zeef. 'Knoop dat in uw oren: niets is zeker. Zeker is niets.

I love you but I got to love me more.

Her eyes were trained to see the missing parts of the world.

I believe that most caregivers find that they inherit a situation where they just kind of move into caregiving. It's not a conscious decision for most caregivers, and they are ultimately left with the responsibility of working while still trying to be the caregiver, the provider, and the nurturer.- Sharon Law Tucker

He easily gathered her in his arms; Gramma was made up of skin and bones and hate and crazy - and hate and crazy don't weigh anything.

Her ability to use language, that thing that most separates humans from animals, was leaving her, and she was feeling less and less human as it departed. She's said a tearful good-bye to okay some time ago.

Her memories got dizzy and fell out of her head.

Hi lover," he says to me, completely forgetting what happened before. He knows who I am. He knows that I am the one person who he loves, has always loved. No disease, no person can take that away. (p.205)

I don't know which hurt more: his rejection, his punch, or my own elder siblings laughing at my pain.

Many of us follow the commandment 'Love One Another.' When it relates to caregiving, we must love one another with boundaries. We must acknowledge that we are included in the 'Love One Another.

In Dementialand I was able to see for miles without the yesterdays and tomorrows obstructing my view. It was difficult and so simple all at the same time.

I saw my mother with eyes opened and not curtained by her motherhood or my ego.

looking at my reflection, in the window opposite, hollow and translucent, I see a woman disappearing. It would help if I looked like that in real life – if the more the disease advanced, the more ‘see-through’ I became until, eventually, I would be just a wisp of a ghost. How much more convenient it would be, how much easier for everyone, including me, if my body just melted away along with my mind. Then we’d all know where we were, literally and metaphysically.

Many caregivers share that they often feel alone, isolated, and unappreciated. Mindfulness can offer renewed hope for finding support and value for your role as a caregiver…It is an approach that everyone can use. It can help slow you down some so you can make the best possible decisions for your care recipient. It also helps bring more balance and ease while navigating the caregiving journey.

My mother made that dress. She’s somewhere in its unsettling pattern.

Maud Shade was eighty when a sudden hush Fell on her life. We saw the angry flush And torsion of paralysis assail Her noble cheek. We moved her to Pinedale, Famed for its sanitarium. There she'd sit In the glassed sun and watch the fly that lit Upon her dress and then upon her wrist. Her mind kept fading in the growing mist. She still could speak. She paused, and groped, and found What seemed at first a serviceable sound, But from adjacent cells impostors took The place of words she needed, and her look Spelt imploration as she fought in vain To reason with the monsters in her brain.

[Memory]... is a system of near-infinite complexity, a system that seems designed for revision as much as for replication, and revision unquestionably occurs. Details from separate experiences weave together, so that the rememberer thinks of them as having happened together. The actual year or season or time of day shifts to a different one. Many details are lost, usually in ways that serve the self in its present situation, not the self of ten or twenty or forty years ago when the remembered event took place. And even the fresh memory, the 'original,' is not reliable in a documentary sense....Memory, in short, is not a record of the past but an evolving myth of understanding the psyche spins from its engagement with the world.

Never give up hope. If you do, you'll be dead already.--Dementia Patient, Rose from The Inspired Caregiver

My caregiver mantra is to remember 'The only control you have is over the changes you choose to make.

My mother had a way of accessing the energy of the people around her. There was no need to know their name, who they were or how she knew them. She didn’t recognize their surface. She went much deeper.

Never give up hope. If you do, you'll be dead already.-- Dementia Patient Rose in The Inspired Caregiver

Offering care means being a companion, not a superior. It doesn’t matter whether the person we are caring for is experiencing cancer, the flu, dementia, or grief. If you are a doctor or surgeon, your expertise and knowledge comes from a superior position. But when our role is to be providers of care, we should be there as equals.

She almost thought she'd said the words aloud, but she hadn't. They remained trapped in her head, but not because they were barricaded by plaques and tangles. She just couldn't say them aloud

She could have rambled with all the fervor of a woman who had loved one entity for longer than most races live, and with the inviolable, unquestioned certainty found in dementia. There were references dated and sealed with meticulous care which she would have enthusiastically opened with the mirth of one proclaiming a lifetime of honors and awards. But that singular event was freshly disturbed; its pores still drifted on the faint zephyr of remembrance.

Psychologist: "This, ah, is a new sort of, ah, psychopathology that we're only now beginning to, ah, understand. These, ah, super-serial killers have no, ah, 'type' but, ah, rather consider everyone to be their 'type.'" Gramma: "Did you hear that? Your daddy's a superhero!

So began a kind of magic in Dementialand that took place most nights after the day’s sun went down.

So about an hour later we are in the taxi shooting along empty country roads towards town. The April light is clear as an alarm. As we pass them it gives a sudden sense of every object existing in space on its own shadow. I wish I could carry this clarity with me into the hospital where distinctions tend to flatten and coalesce. I wish I had been nicer to him before he got crazy. These are my two wishes.

She’d forgotten to love, but she also forgot to hate. (about Clara’s mother, who had dementia)

She looked like some damn fool angel that didn't even know the name of God.

Shut your mouth - there's a bus coming.

The lady roommate said very little and chopped off the better parts of her story.

The idea of disassociating from one’s surrounding, of taking a step back was rather clever on my mother’s part without her notice.

Someday, I suppose I’ll give up, and sit in the rocking chair. But I’ll probably be rocking fast, because I don’t know what I’ll do without a job.

The evening's light, silvery, casts its dull brightness onto the trees--trees gelid in this blue light of winter. But whiteness dominates with the pines and evergreens steeped in vibrant grades of silver. I hear notes in the mist, like silvery chattering, coins in a pocket, the jangle of keys. Pg 217

There were thousands of secrets hidden in her purse, secrets and memories that took her elsewhere. She held onto them tightly and kept them to herself. Even God did not know of them.

There is a duality to darkness known only to those who’ve been infected by its touch. Everyone knows the shadows: shallow, comfortable, mostly harmless places where one might nest for a night. But the depths of living pitch only visit the aristocracy of madmen and women who’ve unwittingly pledged fealty to the curse. For some, it outright ruins minds like a hound to fresh meat; for others, it wanes into the deepest parts of its less caustic sibling and waits for the time to strike, returning periodically through life like an incurable disease.

There is magic just outside our memory.

This woman had no idea who I was. She has no idea I was once a smoker, was thrown out of boarding school twice and a certified rebel with strong opinions. To her, I was new, fresh, immaculate to the bone. This was all strangely wonderful.