Caregivers’ calling

My father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease at the age of 80. Shortly after he received the diagnosis, I sat with him at the kitchen table. With a look of despair on his face, he said, "I don't know how I've let this happen to me." I tried to assure him that this wasn't something he had "let happen." To both of us, however, the diagnosis felt like a death sentence.

Had I read the three books listed here, especially Susan and John McFadden's Aging Together and its chapter "Receiving the Diagnosis," I might have been more helpful to my father in that difficult moment. I might also have had a more coherent response to the well-intentioned friends of my mother who told her, as my father's illness grew worse, that she should "simply forget him, let him go and act as if he were already gone." He needed precisely the opposite assurance—that he would continue to be loved and valued, and that he would have our support in living his life as well as possible amid adversity.

The McFaddens acknowledge that the announcement of a diagnosis of cognitive impairment or Alzheimer's can be devastating to hear. But they also imagine and argue that it can be otherwise: