Many of us follow the commandment ‘Love One Another.’ When it relates to caregiving, we must love one another with boundaries. We must acknowledge that we are included in the ‘Love One Another.

She forgot my name, so either I’m not important or she has amnesia. I wonder how long she’s suffered from dementia.

My caregiver mantra is to remember ‘The only control you have is over the changes you choose to make.

You will never experience personal growth, if you fear taking chances. And, you will never become successful, if you operate without integrity.

I don’t want to ever see her again, because I want to always remember her as she was—young and beautiful. She won’t remember, because she was 88 when we met and suffering from dementia.

Many caregivers share that they often feel alone, isolated, and unappreciated. Mindfulness can offer renewed hope for finding support and value for your role as a caregiver…It is an approach that everyone can use. It...

What made Olive the saddest about the Gardners was that everyone wanted to be enshrined in someone’s memory. It was the only way of living on after death, really: in the minds of loved ones....

The evening’s light, silvery, casts its dull brightness onto the trees–trees gelid in this blue light of winter. But whiteness dominates with the pines and evergreens steeped in vibrant grades of silver. I hear notes...

Shut your mouth – there’s a bus coming.

Caregiving will never be one-size-fits-all.

Dementia was like a truth serum.

Never give up hope! If you do, you be dead already.

…wondering, not for the first time, if there was a kind of dark bliss built into dementia: an immunity from death and abandonment, a way of fixing a point in time so that nothing can...

Someday, I suppose I’ll give up, and sit in the rocking chair. But I’ll probably be rocking fast, because I don’t know what I’ll do without a job.

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:...

looking at my reflection, in the window opposite, hollow and translucent, I see a woman disappearing. It would help if I looked like that in real life – if the more the disease advanced, the...

Her ability to use language, that thing that most separates humans from animals, was leaving her, and she was feeling less and less human as it departed. She’s said a tearful good-bye to okay some...

Affirmations are our mental vitamins, providing the supplementary positive thoughts we need to balance the barrage of negative events and thoughts we experience daily.

He easily gathered her in his arms; Gramma was made up of skin and bones and hate and crazy – and hate and crazy don’t weigh anything.

I’m so sorry I have this. I can’t stand the thought of how much worse this is going to get. I can’t stand the thought of looking at you someday, and this face I love,...

In the heart or every caregiver is a knowing that we are all connected. As I do for you, I do for me.

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 while a bald head and a looped ribbon were seen as badges of courage and hope, her reluctant vocabulary and vanishing memories advertised mental instability and impending insanity. Those with cancer could expect to...

Caregiving often calls us to lean into love we didn’t know possible.

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...

[Memory]… is a system of near-infinite complexity, a system that seems designed for revision as much as for replication, and revision unquestionably occurs. Details from separate experiences weave together, so that the rememberer thinks of...

Never give up hope. If you do, you’ll be dead already.–Dementia Patient, Rose from The Inspired Caregiver

My dementia hasn’t just affected me – it’s affected my friends and family, too.

Butterfly KissesAged imperfectionsstitched upon my faceyears and years of wisdomearned by His holy grace.Quiet solitude in a humble homeall the family scattered nowlike nomads do they roam.Then a giftsent from abovea memorypure and tangiblewrapped in...

By loving you more, you love the person you are caring for more.

We were young and in love. Well, at least I was young. I was fourteen and she was ninety-four. She tried to act like she never remembered we were dating, probably due to her dementia.

Een geboorte of een huwelijk mag dan een belangrijke gebeurtenis zijn, maar het garandeert geen plaats in het geheugen.’ De hersens, een zeef.’Knoop dat in uw oren: niets is zeker. Zeker is niets.

I love you but I got to love me more.

My #love stories have happy endings, because I stop the tales before dejection, dementia, and death occur.

When a fine old carpet is eaten by mice, the colors and patterns of what’s left behind do not change,’ wrote my neighbor and friend, the poet Jane Hirschfield, after she visited an old friend...