Dementia hovers over America’s 54 million seniors (most recent 2019 figures) like a slightly noxious cloud that either already affects some 7 million of them or has the remaining 47 million (and their families) making nervous jokes about constantly misplacing their keys. While dementia comes in various forms and severities (some 70% from Alzheimer’s disease), its common core is heartbreak.
These emotional impacts are borne not only by those who fall to it, but in many ways, even more heavily by family members and other intimates who must watch their beloved not merely decline and die, but in the often long dying, turn into someone almost unknowable, alien to who they had been.
Canadian writer and Nobel Literature Prize winner Alice Munro, now 90 herself, explored some of this heartbreak and the adaptations caregiving spouses try to make in coping with it in her widely hailed short story, “The Bear Came Ove...
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