July 13, 2025
Dear Dementia,
We have done a horrific job of caring for you. Everyone loves to quote Teepa Snow in saying, “Until there is a cure, there’s care” and yet, we are still so cure centric in are approach to you. This has always bothered me.
When I started to enter the professional world of elder care, it amazed me how often people would fundraise until they were blue in the face and yet they would not lift a finger to support the husband or wife putting themselves in financial ruin to care for their loved one. We would leap over backwards to attend that gala but would be quick to tell a resident they must move for the 4th time that year because they were running out of funds, instead of working with them from the start to minimize these moves.
I have struggled with this, tried to fight it, and it is exhausting. It even shows up in how we obsess over the clinical care and yet ignore the relational care. You gave me the gift of seeing many sides to elder care, the personal and the professional, the in-home and the community care. You showed me all the little ways we fail in this world to accompany someone living with you and all the ways we are succeeding. We sit on the eve of the anniversary of my grandmother’s diagnosis. I am reliving all the ways even, I myself, can be cure centric. Longing to find a way to remove you from a story.
Until tomorrow,
Kate
