Dementia Quotes

“To care for those who once cared for us is one of the highest honors.”
― Tia Walker, The Inspired Caregiver: Finding Joy While Caring for Those You Love

“Caregiving often calls us to lean into love we didn't know possible.”
― Tia Walker, The Inspired Caregiver: Finding Joy While Caring for Those You Love

“In the heart or every caregiver is a knowing that we are all connected. As I do for you, I do for me.”
― Tia Walker, The Inspired Caregiver: Finding Joy While Caring for Those You Love

“I love you but I got to love me more.”
― Peggi Speers, The Inspired Caregiver: Finding Joy While Caring for Those You Love

“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 be supported by their community. Alice expected to be an outcast.”
― Lisa Genova, Still Alice

“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 of living pitch only visit the aristocracy of madmen and women who’ve unwittingly pledged fealty to the curse. For some, it outright ruins minds like a hound to fresh meat; for others, it wanes into the deepest parts of its less caustic sibling and waits for the time to strike, returning periodically through life like an incurable disease.”
― Darrell Drake, Where Madness Roosts

“By loving you more, you love the person you are caring for more. ”
― Peggi Speers, The Inspired Caregiver: Finding Joy While Caring for Those You Love

“Dementia. Ruth puzzled over the diagnosis: How could such a beautiful-sounding word apply to such a destructive disease? It was a name befitting a goddess: Dementia, who caused her sister Demeter to forget to turn winter into spring.”
― Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter

“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.”
― Peggi Speers

“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 more ‘see-through’ I became until, eventually, I would be just a wisp of a ghost. How much more convenient it would be, how much easier for everyone, including me, if my body just melted away along with my mind. Then we’d all know where we were, literally and metaphysically.”
― Rowan Coleman, The Day We Met

“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 time ago.”
― Lisa Genova, Still Alice

“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.”
― Barry Lyga

“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 sealed with meticulous care which she would have enthusiastically opened with the mirth of one proclaiming a lifetime of honors and awards. But that singular event was freshly disturbed; its pores still drifted on the faint zephyr of remembrance.”
― Darrell Drake, Everautumn

“Never give up hope! If you do, you be dead already.”
― Rose in The Inspired Caregiver

“Butterfly Kisses

Aged imperfections
stitched upon my face
years and years of wisdom
earned by His holy grace.
Quiet solitude in a humble home
all the family scattered now
like nomads do they roam.
Then a gift
sent from above
a memory
pure and tangible
wrapped in innocence and
unquestioning love.
A butterfly kiss
lands gently upon my cheek
from an unseen child
a kiss most sweet.
Heaven grants grace
and tears follow
as youth revisits
this empty hollow.”
― Muse, Enigmatic Evolution

“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.”
― Pat Summitt, Sum It Up: 1,098 Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses, and a Life in Perspective

“You only know yourself because of your memories.”
― Andrea Gillies

“Never give up hope. If you do, you'll be dead already.--Dementia Patient, Rose from The Inspired Caregiver”
― Peggi Speers , The Inspired Caregiver: Finding Joy While Caring for Those You Love

“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 suffering from Alzheimer's disease in a nursing home. And so it was with my father. His mind did not melt evenly into undistinguishable lumps, like a dissolving sand castle. It was ravaged selectively, like Tintern Abbey, the Cistercian monastery in northern Wales suppressed in 1531 by King Henry VIII in his split with the Church of Rome. Tintern was turned over to a nobleman, its stained-glass windows smashed, its roof tiles taken up and relaid in village houses. Holy artifacts were sold to passing tourists. Religious statues turned up in nearby gardens. At least one interior wall was dismantled to build a pigsty.

I've seen photographs of the remains that inspired Wordsworth: a Gothic skeleton, soaring and roofless, in a green hilly landscape. Grass grows in the transept. The vanished roof lets in light. The delicate stone tracery of its slim, arched quatrefoil windows opens onto green pastures where black-and-white cows graze. Its shape is beautiful, formal, and mysterious. After he developed dementia, my father was no longer useful to anybody. But in the shelter of his broken walls, my mother learned to balance her checkbook, and my heart melted and opened. Never would I wish upon my father the misery of his final years. But he was sacred in his ruin, and I took from it the shards that still sustain me.”
― Katy Butler, Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death

“My caregiver mantra is to remember 'The only control you have is over the changes you choose to make.”
― Nancy L. Kriseman, The Mindful Caregiver: Finding Ease in the Caregiving Journey

“Kamers horen absolute zekerheden te zijn. De manier waarop zij in elkaar overlopen hoort eens en voor altijd vast te liggen. Een deur moet geopend kunnen worden. Niet in angst en onzekerheid omdat je geen idee hebt wat je erachter zult vinden.”
― J. Bernlef, Hersenschimmen

“When I got off the train back home, I saw the WHITE and COLORED signs that had been there all along, as it it was the first time.”
― Dorothy Hampton Marcus, I Didn't Know What I Didn't Know: A Southern White Woman's Story about Race

“I don't know which hurt more: his rejection, his punch, or my own elder siblings laughing at my pain.”
― Dorothy Hampton Marcus, I Didn't Know What I Didn't Know: A Southern White Woman's Story about Race

“You will never experience personal growth, if you fear taking chances. And, you will never become successful, if you operate without integrity.”
― T a Sorensen, Where's My Purse?

“Never give up hope. If you do, you'll be dead already.-- Dementia Patient Rose in The Inspired Caregiver”
― Peggi Speer and Tia Walker

“I believe that most caregivers find that they inherit a situation where they just kind of move into caregiving. It's not a conscious decision for most caregivers, and they are ultimately left with the responsibility of working while still trying to be the caregiver, the provider, and the nurturer.- Sharon Law Tucker”
― Peggi Speers, The Inspired Caregiver: Finding Joy While Caring for Those You Love

“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 can help slow you down some so you can make the best possible decisions for your care recipient. It also helps bring more balance and ease while navigating the caregiving journey.”
― Nancy L. Kriseman, The Mindful Caregiver: Finding Ease in the Caregiving Journey

“Caregiving will never be one-size-fits-all.”
― Nancy L. Kriseman, The Mindful Caregiver: Finding Ease in the Caregiving Journey

“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. Memories were the only things that made aging bearable, a way of reverting to better, simpler days.”
― Andrea Lochen, The Repeat Year

“…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 change, nothing can be rewritten, no one can leave.”
― Jonathan Miles, Want Not