Love and Dementia

To love what is: The caregiving life.

by Alix Kates Shulman

How to Use Your Brain in Perpetuity

As I learned the hard way 8 years ago, when my husband began the downward spiral of dementia after suffering a traumatic brain injury, doctors are loath to admit they know little about what causes dementia and nothing about how to prevent, treat, or cure it. Read More

One Benefit of Dementia

Sweetheart that he is, my 80-year-old husband is usually very cooperative, despite severe dementia resulting from a traumatic brain injury suffered five years ago. Read More

Could Happen

Before the accident that left him like someone with advanced Alzheimer's, my husband was an artist. After the severe injuries to his brain's frontal lobes, centers for the "executive functions" that enable us to conceive and carry out plans, he found it difficult to make art. Read More

The Thriller

The summer I turned fourteen, I spent a month at the Lake Erie resort town of Cedar Point, with a friend whose parents ran a food concession on the boardwalk, which boasted the highest roller coaster in Ohio. It was called The Thriller and I fell in love with it. Read More

The Dance of Experience and Time

Before Scott, my beloved husband, fell from a sleeping loft, sustaining the devastating traumatic brain injury that transformed our lives, I divided experience into two distinct kinds, both of which any satisfying life depends upon. The first consists of those pleasurable transitory experiences, often sensual--like eating, sex, art--that quickly vanish. Read More

How to Survive in a Hospital and Fire a Doctor

To continue the story of my memoir, To Love What Is:

After six weeks in a Maine ICU, my husband, Scott, who suffered traumatic brain injury (TBI) after falling from a sleeping loft, was flown to NYU Hospital in New York for rehab.

Rehab? On his first night there he fell off a gurney, causing new brain clots. Read More

Age, Trauma, and Contentment

Unaware of his accident or his dementia, my husband attributes his lack of short-term memory--the result of a traumatic brain injury that left him, at 75, like someone with advanced Alzheimer's--simply to aging. Read More

The Accident

One day it happens, the dreaded event that will change your life, the more ominous because you don't know what form it will take or when it will occur. To me it happened on July 22, 2004, at two a.m. on a Maine coastal island in a remote seaside cabin, with no electricity, plumbing or road, when my beloved husband fell nine feet from a sleeping loft and injured his brain. Read More

Alix Kates Shulman is the author of 14 books including the best-seller Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen and a memoir about life with her brain-injured husband, To Love What Is.

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