When you or a loved one begins to age, life changes. Some of these changes are natural and require just a few adjustments, and other changes make daily life more challenging and frustrating. When you start to notice your loved one is showing signs they can no longer do things on their own, it might […]
June is Brain and Alzheimer’s Awareness Month and a Time to Reflect
June 6, 2018 Dear Editor Re: June is Brain and Alzheimer’s Awareness Month and a Time to Reflect Despite the fact that 5,500,000 Americans currently suffer from Alzheimer’s, and it is a deadly assault now facing Baby Boomers, it is a crisis too rarely considered until the crisis is our own. In fact, 40% of […]
Dementia: The Paralyzing Enigma of Our Generation Chapters 1-6
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Christmas carols bring comfort and joy to loved ones with dementia (Your letters)
To the Editor: Unfortunately, many families with a loved one suffering from dementia view the affliction as a curse and a burden, especially at Christmastime. We naturally turn to our own happy Christmas memories before the onset of dementia and often dwell upon what has been lost in the family to this corrosive disease. But […]
Stephen Bowman on leadership: Embrace risk, not conventional thinking
Stephen Bowman is shown at the headquarters of the Peregrine Companies, the umbrella organization for his real-estate development and senior-care companies. What qualities are required for entrepreneurship and leadership? Bowman lists creativity, passion and the ability to take fresh ideas seriously. “Don’t be afraid of new ideas,” he says. “Not only intellectually, but also in […]
Dementia and the Daunting Challenge for Families
I think it strange and disheartening that as a society, once a friend or a loved one is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the overwhelming reaction is to feel primary sympathy for the spouse and family, rather than for those struck down. It seems that after the initial blow has been absorbed, we are very quick to […]
What We Need To Know On Alzheimer’s Awareness Day
Celebrating Alzheimer’s Awareness Day on September 21 is a bit like our confrontation of global warming or the global population explosion; we understand the causes, but as a society, we have no idea how to respond. For Baby Boomers this is just the latest, and probably the last, great social upheaval we are to live […]
The Odyssey of Memory
America’s Baby Boomers are transfixed by the rapidly declining health of their parents; embarrassing incontinence one day, excruciating constipation another, all too familiar flash backs of what we did a few years ago for our children. Still the unspoken and dreaded terror, lurking behind all of our faith and dreams, is godforsaken dementia. All around […]
The Spirituality of the Dementia Journey
As our American families rush inexorably into our dementia epidemic, the most frequently unspoken question is, “when is the individual gone”? Or put more prosaically, if my mom can no longer recognize her children, is my mother gone and is the husk of her body a simple vestige of only my memory, but not her […]