Unit 6  Section 3Exercise 7Experience of dementia
In the following pages, you will recognize several earlier themes, this time specifically related to dementia. These include the sense of loss associated with aging, the pain and frustration experienced by family in the face of elder’s encroaching disability, and the challenges professional caregivers face in dealing with complex disease states and functional loss.
Though dementia is challenging, if not downright devastating, the following examples exhibit moments of humor, innovation and affection when facing this condition.
Read the poem, “Psst, your cognitive slip is showing.”
View the Gene Cohen video clip
Read the excerpt called “Time Slips” and visit the Time Slips web site
Read the excerpt “Something to remember”
Answer the discussion questions following each assignment.
Paula Tatarunis, "Psst, your cognitive slip is showing"
Three times, lately, reaching in
the brain’s dark closet for “wardrobe”
I’ve pulled out “vocabulary.”
Seems mind has grown a temperamental lobe.
Well, OK, both concepts do express,
and each clothes a certain nakedness
but I like to think
my word wardrobe’s as big
as my clothes vocabulary is small
and I suppose
one tiny faux pas, sartorial,
is no big deal
when you consider matter from this angle:
that some day all I might retrieve
when I’m groping for a simple cotton sleeve
or a soft off-rhyme for dingle-dangle
is a neurofibrillary hanger tangle
Study questions
1.What is the author’s attitude towards her memory loss? Compare this with the objective accomplishments of the poem.
2. How do patients with early dementia present? Do persons with Alzheimer’s disease ever recognize that they have the disease?
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