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Latest Voices
Still Himself
“I don’t want to live with this,” read a note we found afterward. “Just let me die.”
At the time he wrote the note, Dad had recently been diagnosed with cognitive impairment, often a precursor to Alzheimer’s; years earlier, his uncle had suffered from what was then called “senile dementia.”
A Knock on the Door
Sometimes dementia comes barging in the front door; other times, more stealthily, it comes tip-toeing in the back. My mom’s Alzheimer’s came in through the back end of things, because it involved picking her up for a potentially life-saving colonoscopy, and if anything signifies the back end of things, it’s a colonoscopy! I told her I’d leave my house at 8 a.m. to pick her up, but she called me at 8 p.m. the night before, asking why I hadn’t called. This episode was the conduit for her moving in with my husband and me. She stayed here for
The Nurse Honor Guard
Recently, I attended a funeral gathering for my long-time friend, Flo, who’d been an RN for over four decades. She’d been a loving wife, mother and grandmother. But I also remember several pivotal times in her life that Flo had shown courage and faced physical and emotional risks.
La Stessa Zuppa
A few days ago, I received an Orwellian email about my National Institute of Health (NIH) biosketch from the director of an NIH-funded research center at my institution. We are submitting an application for renewal of our funding, and all mentions of health disparities, health inequities, low-income patients, and safety-net hospitals were highlighted on my biosketch with a request that I delete them.
I responded to my colleague’s e-mail, “Sure, I’ll do it (with some reluctance, horrible to have to do this).” I didn’t want to jeopardize my institution’s (and my) funding, so I edited out the undesirable language where
The Changing Course of Dementia
Every morning, my grandparents would make breakfast, go for a walk, and drive to our house for lunch. In the afternoon, Grandfather watched football while Grandmother read magazines or worked in the garden. She planned to grow tomatoes once the spring rolled around.
She never did plant those tomatoes. In an unexpected cascade of events, my grandfather was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And while my grandmother had been struggling with her memory for a while, her dementia took a drastic turn after his diagnosis. She acted out in ways that were unlike her: calling the police, chasing my ill
You Say Potato, I Say . . .
New York radio station WBAI has Gershwin classics on all day. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong are singing the one that always made her laugh. I hope she’s still able to hear it; I turn up the volume:
You say potato, I say po-tah-to,
You say tomato, I say to-mah-to, . . .
She sits mute, a breathing statue whose life has been slowly erased from within.
Our days are gray, bleak, silent. Her silence can last days, sometimes weeks. I hear only half-words, gentle grunts, mumbles, and sighs. I wonder if she is able to think.
A Haunting Disease
Dad and I visited Ma every day in the nursing home. Sometimes she greeted me with a smile and a welcoming, “Well, look who’s here!” Other times she dismissed me with a menacing look and hurtful words: “You’re a piece of shit.” Dad would remind me that it was her dementia speaking, but that didn’t erase my heartache or dry my tears.
Despite lacking higher education, due to her immigrant parents’ belief that daughters did not deserve a college degree, Ma was a smart woman. She read constantly, both novels and newspapers, and she could mentally add up her grocery
March More Voices: Dementia
Dear readers,
Our first inkling of trouble came when Maman, my Belgian mother, got lost en route to our house. After my father died, Maman had been living alone in a New Jersey apartment, and she would periodically drive across the George Washington Bridge to come visit us.
One day she didn’t arrive on schedule. After an hour had passed and we were growing frantic, the phone rang.
“I’m at a restaurant,” Maman said.
“Which one?”
“The one we always go to,” she said.
Portraits of Persistence and Hope
As a family doctor, I see acts of bravery every day. Not big, showy, public acts, but individual, ordinary acts. Acts by people who, in the face of adversity, choose to live and to believe in a future.
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