Reconciliation and Denial: Two Elements of Family Dementia Stories

The 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, 2014

Novel, We Are Not Ourselves, by Matthew Thomas, Simon & Shuster, 2014


Links:

From Russell Teagarden’s blog, According to the Arts: 

• The Faraway Nearby, by Rebecca Solnit: the book; comparison of excerpts with biomedical text
• We Are Not Ourselves, by Matthew Thomas

Thanks to Alexis Teagarden, PhD, for bringing Rebecca Solnit’s, The Faraway Nearby, to our attention.


Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to: russell.teagarden@theclinicandtheperson.com.

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Executive producer:  Anne Bentley