Dementia Quotes

“Affirmations are our mental vitamins, providing the supplementary positive thoughts we need to balance the barrage of negative events and thoughts we experience daily.”
― Tia Walker, The Inspired Caregiver: Finding Joy While Caring for Those You Love

“Of all ruins, that of a noble mind is the most deplorable.

- The Adventure of the Dying Detective”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes

“Dementia was like a truth serum.”
― Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter

“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!”
― Barry Lyga, I Hunt Killers - Free Preview (The First 10 Chapters): with Bonus Prequel Short Story "Career Day"

“Een mens kan altijd een tijd lang kijken zonder te zien. Kijken kan Robert ook, maar het theebusje en de kaasschaaf herkennen niet. Hij kijkt zonder te zien, bedoel ik. Neem zelf de proef maar eens. Je drinkt altijd koffie van een bepaald merk en omdat dat in de drugstore opeens niet meer voorradig is, neem je een ander merk, een andere bus. Als je de volgende dag koffie wilt maken zoek je overal naar de koffiebus. Het herinneringsbeeld van de oude busis zo sterk dat hij de bus van het nieuwe merk, de aanwezige bus, vlak voor je neus op de keukenplank, onzichtbaar maakt. Om iets te zien moet je eerst iets kunnen herkennen. Zonder herinnering kun je alleen maar kijken. Dan glijdt de wereld spoorloos door je heen.”
― J. Bernlef, Hersenschimmen

“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”
― Lisa Genova, Still Alice

“The dominant narrative is a horror story. People with Alzheimer's are perceived as zombies, bodies without minds, waiting for valiant researchers to find a cure. For Alice and me, the story was different. Alzheimer's was a time of healing and magic. Of course, there is loss with dementia, but what matters is how we approach our losses and our gains. Reframing dementia as a different way of being, as a window into another reality, lets people living in that state be our teachers — useful, true humans who contribute to our collective good, instead of scary zombies.”
― Dana Walrath, Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass

“Ze zaten op de banken en in rolstoelen naar de radio te luisteren, hun doffe ogen gericht op de vissen of op niets of op iets dat ze lang geleden hadden gezien.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“I think about how the language I’ve mourned never learning has on some levels already been taught. A language I thought too difficult to warrant effort has already embedded itself into me.”
― Jessica George, Maame

“How do I connect with my wife and get her to connect with me? This is always a constant desperation on my part especially because she doesn't speak. I am always afraid she will stop connecting with me, especially when I get that blank look, that "daze into no man's land."That is the day I am trying to avoid. There are different things I do, depending on the moment and situation we are in, always taking every opportunity I can to promote interaction with her.”
― Sammie Marsalli, Preventing Her Shutdown

“The real scary moment for me is when she wakes up in the morning and I greet her, she stares at me as if she doesn't recognize me. There is a gaze and no "connection" which really scares me. I ask her "do you want a big kiss or small one" and she sometimes gestures a small one. If no answer I just kiss her anyway and she responds with a smile, now I am "connecting". I pray that gaze of no recognition in the "wakeup" never lasts forever. "Please God, don't let her go into Neverland”
― Sammie Marsalli, Preventing Her Shutdown

“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.”
― Wendy Wimmer, Entry Level

“Within a year of retirement, Dad showed the early signs of dementia. By 2017, his symptoms were declared mid-stage by his family physician. It's a sad truth, but ultimately, we don't choose the course of our lives.”
― J.R. Whitsell, That Moment In Time: Two: What If We Helped?

“My father went into hospital with leg ulcers that were slow to heal. There were strict visiting hours and then, with an outbreak of norovirus, a virtual lockdown of the ward, which meant that for days on end he was alone: nobody to hold his hand, speak his name, tell him he was loved; nobody to keep him tethered to the world. His leg ulcers were healed, but away from the home he loved, stripped of familiar routines and surrounded by strangers and machines, he swiftly lost his bearings and his fragile hold upon his self. There is a great chasm between care and 'care', and my father fell into it.”
― Nicci Gerrard

“It's like she's the living dead,' says Pauline. 'A long time ago, I lost her. I talk, and there's no reaction. Sometimes, when she laughs, or something in the tone of her voice - then I recognise the way we were twenty years ago. You fill in the gaps and the memories. Then she leaves again. You say goodbye all the time.”
― Nicci Gerrard

“But for people who are at the end stages of dementia, death should not be fought against. It's a kindness. Let them go.”
― Nicci Gerrard

“Dementia is a particularly long farewell to the self. With most illnesses, death comes quite swiftly. With dementia, the flicker with which life ends is excruciatingly slowed.”
― Nicci Gerrard

“There's an anticipated, ambiguous grief; a premature mourning of the self, or of the beloved other.
During dementia's last stages, a beloved person may be there and yet absent, a powerful reminder of the self's loss.”
― Nicci Gerrard

“To mourn someone who is still alive brings a particular, complicated pain. And often it brings guilt; to mourn someone who has not yet died is to consign them to a kind of death.”
― Nicci Gerrard

“During dementia's end-game, a person goes to a place where we cannot follow them and can barely guess at. The bursts of lucidity that those with catastrophic memory loss can sometimes have are like bright, sharp flashes of lightning over a blasted landscape.”
― Nicci Gerrard

“The mystery of what goes on inside the mind of another person becomes terrifyingly impenetrable in the final stages of dementia; twilight to pitch dark at the vanishing line between life and death.”
― Nicci Gerrard

“Wandering has long been seen as part of the pathology of dementia. Doctors, carers, and relatives often try to stop patients from venturing out alone, out of concern they will injure themselves, or won’t remember the way back. “When a person without dementia goes for a walk, it is called going for a stroll, getting some fresh air, or exercising,” anthropologist Megan Graham observes in her recent paper. “When a person with dementia goes for a walk beyond prescribed parameters, it is typically called wandering, exit-seeking, or elopement. Yet wandering may not be so much a part of the disease as a therapeutic response to it. Even though dementia, and Alzheimer’s in particular, can cause severe disorientation, Graham says the desire to walk should be be seen as “an intention to be alive and to grow, as opposed to as a product of disease and deterioration.” Many in the care profession share her view. The Alzheimer’s Society, the UK’s biggest dementia support and research charity, considers “wandering” an unhelpful description, because “it suggests aimlessness, whereas the walking often has a purpose”. The charity lists several possible reasons why a person might feel compelled to move: they may be continuing the habit of a lifetime; they may be bored, restless, or agitated; they may be searching for a place or person from their past that they believe to be close by. Or maybe they started with a goal in mind, forgot about it, and just kept going.

It is also possible that they are walking to stay alive. Sat in a chair in a room they don’t recognise, with a past they can’t access, it can be a struggle to know who they are. But when they move they are once again wayfinders, engaging in one of the oldest human endeavours, and anything is possible.”
― Michael Shaw Bond, From Here to There: The Art and Science of Finding and Losing Our Way

“....wasn't dementia a fail-safe and soothing oblivion of the machine to its own decay?”
― Samuel shem, The House of God

“Your mother, was she clear in her mind until the end?’ he asked, knowing it was invasive and cruel to do so. Because his mother had died years before her body did, Brunetti was unable to judge which sort of death was worse and for whom. In all these years, although he had asked many people who had lost a parent, he had never had an answer that would decide the case for him.”
― Donna Leon

“On dementia:
It is like you are living in a world with no connection to anyone or anything. It is lonely. It is like nobody is there.”
― Tamsin Calidas, I Am an Island

“We each live in a tiny pool of light, and around us lies the darkness of our un-seeing. We see what we look for and what we look at. (...) It is not possible to see the world we live in, only minute, shuttered portions of it where the beam of our attention falls. When I was a teenager, I noticed other teenagers. Pregnant, I suddenly saw all the pregnant women; then the babies; and then the world was full of small children and their exhausted parents; full of single mothers . . . No I see countless people who are frail and scared -- but that's only because I saw my father so frail and so scared.”
― Nicci Gerrard, The Last Ocean: A Journey through Memory and Forgetting

“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.”
― Stewart Stafford

“I Understand Mom

The fog wraps around her mind
bit and pieces of tattered thought
become blank within her eyes
minutes ago is gone, the sadness inside.

Reaching for a wonderful memory
that was just an hour ago
you fight so hard to bring it back
until you finally let it go.

I’m sorry, I don’t remember
as the tears reach her face
tears roll down a beautiful smile
while your days are being erased.

I understand Mom; I’m here for you
there’s blessings at our door
God is here; He will guide us through
with His love and so much more.”
― Ron Baratono

“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.”
― Jessica George, Maame

“How frightening to know that your brain can betray you this way, that the vessel for our sense of self is often faulty and prone to error. How awful to know that death may come for us over and over, snatching pieces of us little by little until all that is left to take is our body.”
― Nora McInerny, Bad Vibes Only