Reconciliation and Denial: Two Elements of Family Dementia Stories

Send us Fan MailThe millions of families dealing with Alzheimer’s disease produce millions of their own stories. We focus on two particular elements that can be part of a family’s story about dementia. One, from a collection of autobiographical stories, centers on an adult daughter with a long-standing, and justifiable antipathy towards her mother, who nevertheless finds a way to aid her when dementia takes hold. And, while doing so, she finds a new relationship with her mother and takes delight in the personality dementia produces for a time. The other, drawn from a novel, centers on various forms of denial a wife exhibits over several years of her husband’s dementia progression. Featured Content Sources:Stories from, The Faraway Nearby, by Rebecca Solnit, Penguin Books, 2014Novel, We Are Not Ourselves, by Matthew Thomas, Simon & Shuster, 2014Links:From Russell Teagarden’s blog, According to the Arts: The Faraway Nearby, by Rebecca Solnit: the book; comparison of excerpts with biomedical textWe Are Not Ourselves, by Matthew ThomasThanks to Alexis Teagarden, PhD, for bringing Rebecca Solnit’s, The Faraway Nearby, to our attention.Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to: [email protected] for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts.Episode image credit: Alzheimer's disease, artwork. Florence Winterflood. Source: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Executive producer:  Anne Bentley