This website explores the challenges and rewards of staying in touch with people who live with Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia, many of whom develop language and memory loss.
These challenges are daunting and more familiar to most people than the rewards—and they’ve become even more so during the Corona virus pandemic and with social distancing restrictions. It’s no wonder then, that many people regard the onset of Alzheimer’s as the end of a relationship, regardless of how valuable or longstanding it might have been.
But life itself is more complicated than that, and so is life with Alzheimer’s and dementia—even during a pandemic! And while some of life’s complications heighten the challenges, others create opportunities for sustaining relationships we value, literally, until death do us part.
With that ideal in mind, the materials on this website include strategies, questions, and perspectives that can help us stay connected with people we care about as they live through Alzheimer’s and dementia. Sustaining those connections does require contact between people living with these diseases and those of us who don’t. And, the value and rewards of close physical contact, now restricted during the current pandemic, cannot be overestimated. But knowing that we can’t safely touch each other physically, doesn’t mean we can’t continue to touch each other emotionally.
Over the past two months, for example, people have drawn on new protocols for “getting together” and on digital and mediated resources to stay in touch with family members and friends without compromising the protections of social distancing. That’s been a life saver for many of us who live independently. If we can develop similar protocols and resources for people in assisted living, nursing homes, and memory care facilities, it will be a life saver for them as well–and not just during the current pandemic.
This website offers a few suggestions for staying-in-touch strategies during quarantines (which are relatively common for care facilities) that we are exploring further. It also describes principles—such as collaborative trial and error—that can lead to more effective care giving, regardless of external circumstances. And the accounts, examples and illustrations provided here also affirm—as an enduring source of concern and hopefulness—the fundamental humanity that people who live with Alzheimer’s and dementia share with those of us who don’t.
There will always be new things to learn about Alzeimer’s and dementia, care giving challenges and opportunities, and the nature of our shared humanity, so this website is necessarily a work in progress. But behind each topic on the menu bar above you’ll find an account, idea, illustration, or strategy or two, with more to follow.
If you have questions or suggestions for other topics to include or better ways to organize what’s already here, please let me know. Thanks in advance for your interest and attention. And welcome!
Jon Wagner
Professor Emeritus, University of California, Davis
Email: alzheimers@jcwagner.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alzinclusive