Love and Dementia

To Love What Is: The Caregiving Life

Alix Kates Shulman is the author of 12 books including the best-seller Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen and a new memoir about life with her brain-injured husband, To Love What Is. See full bio

September 14, 2009

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

February 12, 2009

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

February 6, 2009

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

December 21, 2008

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

November 21, 2008

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

November 14, 2008

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

October 31, 2008

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

Aging Basics

By 2030, the number of Americans age 65 and over is projected to be about 71.5 million, of which nearly 10 million will be 85 or older. The good news is that many seniors report better health, greater wealth, and higher levels of education than older people in the past.

Go to the Aging Basics page for more on Aging including:

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