Best 69 quotes in «dementia quotes» category

Violet believed that Jewish people made good doctors and lawyers, a thought that came to the front of her head suggesting she might need one.

Violet kept her visits private and never told me where she went. I really never asked. I believed the dementias gave her special powers.

Violet screamed into her pillow so loudly she scared herself. Her head hurt. It was as if all her memories were trying to kick their way out. They were finished and wanted to leave.

Violet unwrapped everything old as if it were a ribboned gift given to her by the Gods.

Violet wasn't sure what she was saying. Words fell out of her mouth with no mind and no malice.

Was the dementia of old age a blessing in disguise? No more thoughts. No more damage inflicted. No more memories of damage survived.

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.

When a fine old carpet is eaten by mice, the colors and patterns of what's left behind do not change,' wrote my neighbor and friend, the poet Jane Hirschfield, after she visited an old friend suffering from Alzheimer's disease in a nursing home. And so it was with my father. His mind did not melt evenly into undistinguishable lumps, like a dissolving sand castle. It was ravaged selectively, like Tintern Abbey, the Cistercian monastery in northern Wales suppressed in 1531 by King Henry VIII in his split with the Church of Rome. Tintern was turned over to a nobleman, its stained-glass windows smashed, its roof tiles taken up and relaid in village houses. Holy artifacts were sold to passing tourists. Religious statues turned up in nearby gardens. At least one interior wall was dismantled to build a pigsty. I've seen photographs of the remains that inspired Wordsworth: a Gothic skeleton, soaring and roofless, in a green hilly landscape. Grass grows in the transept. The vanished roof lets in light. The delicate stone tracery of its slim, arched quatrefoil windows opens onto green pastures where black-and-white cows graze. Its shape is beautiful, formal, and mysterious. After he developed dementia, my father was no longer useful to anybody. But in the shelter of his broken walls, my mother learned to balance her checkbook, and my heart melted and opened. Never would I wish upon my father the misery of his final years. But he was sacred in his ruin, and I took from it the shards that still sustain me.

When I got off the train back home, I saw the WHITE and COLORED signs that had been there all along, as it it was the first time.

While no one can change the outcome of dementia or Alzheimer's, with the right support you can change the journey.

…wondering, not for the first time, if there was a kind of dark bliss built into dementia: an immunity from death and abandonment, a way of fixing a point in time so that nothing can change, nothing can be rewritten, no one can leave.

You only know yourself because of your memories.

You will never experience personal growth, if you fear taking chances. And, you will never become successful, if you operate without integrity.

An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.

I can't experience my brain because I'm inside of it. If you're imaging your brain, you can also find scary things. As one ages, your brain shrinks. And how much it shrinks, and where it shrinks, relates to conditions like Alzheimer's and dementia.

It is possible to live well with dementia and write best-sellers 'like wot I do.

My experience of people in dementia is that a lot of their personality, a lot of their knowledge, a lot of their experience is still there but there's not a direction connection that they can just reach out and get it and then bring it back.

My mother was wonderfully out about her dementia. She would sort of - she would say to me, I came out to the window cleaner about having dementia. You know, I love the way that verb for coming out of the closet has now become so socially useful for all sorts of situations, like when you need to explain to the window cleaner that you don't know if you paid him or not.

Shakespeare wrote all there is that we need to know about dementia in 'King Lear.

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.

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

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

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???

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)

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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

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

I love you but I got to love me more.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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