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Dementia Quotes

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Dementia Quotes

“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.”

“Even though people experiencing dementia become unable to recount what has just happened, they still go through the experience—even without recall. The psychological present lasts about three seconds. We experience the present even when we have dementia. The emotional pain caused by callous treatment or unkind talk occurs during that period. The moods and actions of people with dementia are expressions of what they have experienced, whether they can still use language and recall, or not.”

“In his moments of lucidity, which would later become increasingly rare and painful, he suggested an explanation of what was happening to him: “I am a guilty man. That is why I am being punished like Abuya's heretical sons, I gazed when I should not have gazed and turned my eyes away when I should not have. I saw a sin committed… a crime…I could have, I should have, done something, called out, shouted, struck a blow. I forgot our precepts, our laws, that require an individual to struggle against evil wherever it appears. I forgot that we can never simply remain spectators, we have no right to stand aside, to keep silent, to let the victim fight the aggressor alone. I forgot so many things that day…That is why I am forgetting other things now. Can there be anything worse than that?” Yes, there was worse, there is worse: to forget that one has forgotten.”

“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.”

“The Familiar Squatter by Stewart Stafford Stranger at a ranting roundabout, Changeling deep in a cranial fog, An infant brooked with abandon, The frail bitterness fumed within. Another dawn, the lid loosens more, Recognition dims, pleading for hints, Let me see my reflection in full now, Squatter with a thousand-yard stare. A planet downsized to an asteroid belt, Leave, and I surrender to disintegrate, Core melts inside this atrophying shell, Beyond repair, a journey of light ahead. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”

“Relationships change and the past isn't some static thing you could keep forever like a photograph. No one else seems to understand that. Just because something happened, it doesn't mean it will mean the same thing to you forever. It changes with you. The friendship you cherished, the wife you adored, the child you raised. It can all become meaningless so easily, which means it was always meaningless from the beginning and you just didn't realise it.”

“Years from now, I’ll be sitting in my wheelchair in the brightest spot in Amsterdam Park, next to the old wooden swings, catching a bit of sun. Next to me, on the new bench that some future mayor will have put there, will be my caregiver who came from a faraway country. She’ll know very little Hebrew, and at my old age, I’ll also remember only a few words—in Hebrew or at all. By then, my memory will have crumbled like an old biscuit left in a coat pocket since last winter, and every time my caregiver calls me “Papi,“ I’ll think she really is my daughter. Those moments in which the past is erased and replaced by an invented history will be my most meaningful ones. They will be what keeps me alive.”

“To be unable to connect with your own past through the act of memory must feel like you were losing a connection to the building blocks of your very identity. If we are the sum of our experiences, what do we become when those experiences vanish from our mind? Do we ourselves eventually disappear?”

“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.”

“Butterfly Kisses Aged imperfections stitched upon my face years and years of wisdom earned by His holy grace. Quiet solitude in a humble home all the family scattered now like nomads do they roam. Then a gift sent from above a memory pure and tangible wrapped in innocence and unquestioning love. A butterfly kiss lands gently upon my cheek from an unseen child a kiss most sweet. Heaven grants grace and tears follow as youth revisits this empty hollow.”

“The Eviction by Stewart Stafford The mind's paper vessel crumples Sodden with learning and memory Ne'er to sail waves of reminiscence A living statue, hewn by sculptor Time. The physician nor the shaman console Self-pitying sobs in the moaning wind Brought down by jackals in the dunes The skull's tenant but a daily squatter Nostalgic waves batter alien shores Déjà vu of the blood and the collegial A stranger's reflection in misting eyes A sandcastle sacked to the four winds © Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved”

“If I’d realised how much that pressure would build inside me, the slow descent into a dull existence, days blemished with concern for my dad and whether I’m looking after him properly — well, I would have stayed out late some nights, lost my virginity at sixteen instead of still having it, developed a fondness for alcohol, sat at bars, smoked weed, danced at clubs, and turned strangers into friends.”

“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.”

“I had been on the doctor yo-yo for many years regarding fatigue and strange illnesses, but this was sickness on steroids! It was far worse than anything I had seen before. I knew what Dementia was and I knew the end result was not pretty. I had seen my elderly grandfather die from it, but he developed it at a far older age. From being diagnosed to death only took a few years. I started to contemplate that I may not make it to fifty years of age.”

“I had grown up thinking of life as a series of linear decisions that if made properly would land me on some distant safe shore where I would finally enjoy the fruits of my labor. Now that I was getting a glimpse of that shore I was struck by the inanity of such an equation. My mother was never going to get another chance to do anything else. She did not have the capacity for regrets, nor was she even able to enjoy the comfort of nostalgia or fond memories--her mind had leaked away too imperceptibly to allow for the clarity to look back on her life and wish she had done things differently. As I continued to worry over what sort of future I was setting myself up for, she seemed a painful cautionary tale that life was not a savings plan, accrued now for enjoyment later. I was alive now. My responsibility was to live now as fully as possible.”

“Sometimes Evelyn got stuck on a word, using it for everything until it started to mean nothing and everything. This week, it was “world.” Everything was the world. The world was everything. It made sense from that vantage point, but the previous week, it had been “wax,” which had the bonus quality of being both a noun and a verb. I waxed her breakfast of wax and then had the wax to give her wax when she really wanted the world. World? Whirled. Whorled. Were Eld. Was she working her way through the dictionary? It was like the language of flowers, a song heard in a different lifetime.”

“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!”