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More Happy Moments at Stage 7 Alzheimer’s

At this late stage of Kate’s Alzheimer’s, I am mindful that our Happy Moments may decline. Thus far, however, we continue to experience them. Yesterday, we had an especially good one.

Our caregiver had a meeting with her agency at the same time we normally go downstairs to the café for ice cream, so Kate and I went by ourselves. Prior to leaving, she wasn’t in one of her cheerful moments and wasn’t talking. I keep a variety of things on the coffee table in our living area that the caregivers and I often read to her.

I picked up a three-ring binder where I have collected a lot of different things about our lives together. I read her something I had written about our dating, falling in love, and getting married. As I read, she began to perk up. By the time we left for the café, she was smiling. While we were at the café, we had an special Happy Moment. We were alone most of the time. She was very relaxed, and we had a conversation that lasted almost an hour.

I didn’t take the attached video yesterday. I took it ten days ago, but it gives you an idea of what our conversations are like at this stage of her Alzheimer’s. The fact that I can’t understand her doesn’t keep me from loving these moments. I treasure them.

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What We Did After Kate’s diagnosis Part 2: Eating Out

Kate was always the cook in our family, and one of the problems we experienced before her diagnosis was her forgetting to prepare dinner. I often came home from the office to discover that she hadn’t planned anything. As a result, we began to eat out more frequently.

After the diagnosis, I started preparing dinner and sometimes getting carryout meals. I wasn’t a good cook and didn’t enjoy cooking. We were trying to enjoy life and each other, and my cooking wasn’t helping us. Gradually, we began to eat out for lunch and dinner seven days a week. Just as we have binged on music, we binged on eating out. Before the pandemic hit in 2020, we had eaten out over 6,000 times.

In addition, we started going to Panera each morning for Sarah to get a muffin. We took our laptops and stayed there for an hour or more before going to lunch. In the afternoon, we went to the café at Barnes and Noble. We were there until time to go to dinner.

Eating out was a great way for us to enjoy life together and kept us from becoming socially isolated. We frequently ran into people we know. We also met new people who were also regulars at the restaurants and cafes where we spent so much time. To be sure, our routine was unusual, but we had fun, and it kept us from being socially isolated.

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Music as Therapy


As I implied in my previous post, at first, music was just a form of entertainment for us, but within the first year, it became therapeutic as well. Kate had a panic attack when I rushed her while we were getting ready for a symphony concert. I tried to calm her, but she was still uneasy when we left home.

After we got in the car, I put on a CD of the Brahms Violin Concerto. I advanced it to the Second Movement which is very soothing and lasts about ten minutes. Before we arrived at the concert, she was just fine. Since then, we have had a number of other occasions like this.

One of those occurred after she woke up from an afternoon nap. She was disturbed about something. As I had done before, I tried to calm her, but that didn’t work. Then I started singing a children’s song, and she joined me. That encouraged me to take my phone out of my pocket and search for children’s songs. I downloaded an album with one hundred of them. We sang for another thirty minutes which left us with a happy ending.

Music has been a very helpful tool in my “Caregivers Toolbox”. Once in a while, she still has similar episodes, usually during the night. I have found that “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music works well. I start out by humming or singing. Then I pick up my phone and play it on my audio system.

There are also times when she just seems to need a boost. Sometimes I use the album of children’s songs mentioned above. Another one I depend on is an album by the Susquehanna Chorale, a choral group we heard one summer at Chautauqua. It has a number of songs that we both enjoy, “Shenandoah”, “Danny Boy”, “Loch Lomond”, “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”, and “Deep River”. We carry music wherever we go. One never knows when it might be needed.

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Our First Steps While Living with Alzheimer’s


Kate’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis was the most serious problem we had faced in our marriage, and it immediately changed my priorities about life. Spending as much time as possible with her jumped to the top of the stack. That sticks with me to the present time. We started having lunch and spending the afternoon together every day. We had always enjoyed movies and began attending them once a week.

Throughout our marriage, we had attended many musical and theatrical events. That was a natural place for us to begin as we sought to “enjoy life and each other”. We were already subscribers to the concerts of our local symphony orchestra and the local community theaters. To that, we added periodic trips to other cities within a two-hour drive of our home in Columbia. Wherever we traveled, we often attended musical and theatrical events.

We stayed busy with these activities, and, as we had hoped, we enjoyed life and each other. And there was much more to come.

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Kate’s Alzheimer’s Diagnosis and Our Thoughts About the Future

For months, I’ve reported on positive changes in Kate’s behavior. She is better now than she was two or three years ago. This doesn’t mean that we have found a way to cure Alzheimer’s, but even at Stage 7, we have found ways to live joyfully.

Occasionally, people ask me how we’ve been able to live so well. I’ve given that a lot of thought and would like to share those thoughts in several upcoming posts.

Today, I’ll focus on our immediate response to Kate’s diagnosis. It was January 21, 2011, exactly one week after she turned seventy. Although we had seen the first signs of dementia more than five years before, the reality of the diagnosis frightened us. Our marriage had been filled with joy, and we were afraid that Alzheimer’s would make that a thing of the past.

We went directly from the doctor’s office to Villa Tronco, a favorite restaurant of ours. We began a conversation that continued for several weeks, perhaps months. We had been caring for our four parents (and my dad’s girlfriend after my mother died) for twenty-two consecutive years. We were aware of the many challenges we were likely to face. Now, it was time to focus on our own future.

We spent much of our time discussing how each of us felt and the first steps we should take. We talked about when to tell our children and our friends. We considered the practical issues, such as legal and financial decisions.

We reflected on the things we had enjoyed during our marriage and wondered how long we could continue living so well. We had no idea but made a decision that worked then and now. We would just enjoy life and each other for as long as we could. I’ll have more to say about this in following posts.