What the Heart Keeps When the Mind Goes: May Sarton on Loving a Loved One Through Dementia

On remaining in loving contact with the intangible, immutable part of the self.

One of the hardest things in life is watching a loved one’s mind slowly syphoned by cognitive illness — that haunting ambiguous loss of the familiar body remaining, but the person slowly fading into otherness, their very consciousness frayed and reconstituted into that of a stranger.

How to go on loving this growing stranger is the supreme challenge of accompanying a precious human being through the most disorienti...