Surviving Alzheimer’s

When I first picked up Surviving Alzheimer’s, I wasn’t looking for a miracle. I wasn’t expecting a cure, or even a roadmap. I was just trying to make sense of the slow, disorienting unraveling that had taken hold of my mom. Alzheimer’s has a way of making you feel like you’re losing someone inch by inch, and I was desperate for anything that could help me hold on to her a little longer—or at least understand what she was going through.

What I found in this book wasn’t just information. It was validation. It was clarity. It was a voice that said, “You’re not imagining this. You’re not alone. And you’re not failing.”

Before reading this book, I carried a lot of guilt. I felt guilty for being impatient. Guilty for correcting her. Guilty for feeling frustrated when she asked the same question for the tenth time in an hour. Guilty for grieving someone who was still physically here.

The author didn’t shy away from the emotional complexity of caregiving. Instead, they acknowledged it head‑on. They described the exhaustion, the confusion, the grief, the moments of unexpected tenderness. Reading those passages felt like someone had reached into my chest and named feelings I hadn’t been able to articulate.

It was the first time I realized that my reactions weren’t signs of weakness—they were signs of love colliding with a disease that rewrites the rules of connection.

One of the most transformative ideas in the book was the concept of entering the person’s reality rather than dragging them back into yours. I didn’t realize how often I had been trying to “correct” my mom—reminding her of dates, insisting she remember people, trying to anchor her to a version of the world she no longer recognized.

The book helped me see that Alzheimer’s isn’t just memory loss; it’s a shift in perception. My mom wasn’t being difficult. She wasn’t choosing confusion. She was navigating a world that had become unpredictable and fragmented.

Once I stopped insisting on accuracy and started focusing on comfort, our relationship softened. Instead of saying, “Mom, that’s not right,” I learned to say, “Tell me more about that.” Instead of arguing about whether someone had visited, I learned to follow her story and meet her where she was.

That shift didn’t just help her—it helped me. It allowed me to see glimpses of her personality still shining through, even when her memory faltered.

Read May 2022