Nearly 7 million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease, most of them elderly, with 10 percent of people over the age of sixty-five affected. But as prevalent as it is, the condition is still widely misunderstood and stigmatized.
You may know someone with dementia: a parent, a grandparent, a spouse, a colleague. For me it was my gran, my beloved maternal grandmother, who lived next door when I was growing up. She had Alzheimer’s, the brain disease that accounts for the majority of dementia cases. She died in 2012, her symptoms having steadily intensified in her final years, a progression familiar to many: first she forgot words, then names, then how to drive her car. I remember visiting her on sunny afternoons after I had moved away from home, when she was no longer able to converse. We sat in her living room in companionable silence, the wall clock ticking louder than I remembered it ever having done before. I’d think of sentiments I wanted to express but couldn’t. Somehow it seemed enough for her that I was there.
