Great NYT article: Racing to Retake a Beloved Trip, Before Dementia Takes Everything

Beautifully written account of a daughter taking her moderately cognitively impaired father on a trip to Europe, back to the “Old Country.” Includes interesting information about something called reminiscence therapy, which tries to evoke and heighten the strongest positive memories a patient has, as a palliative treatment.

Also, some of the author’s blind spots about dementia are familiar from stories on this forum. Trying to coordinate her dad’s cross-country flight to her location from which they will then travel overseas together:

“I don’t need an alarm!” he bellowed. And so I set mine for 10:30 a.m. my time, 7:30 a.m. his, to allow him a fat hour and a half to get ready. When the bells startled the silence of my office the next day, I called him, and he sent me to voice mail. I dialed again.

“I’m up!” he snapped, panicked. Then he hung up. Ten minutes later, he phoned: “Why didn’t you give me any information? I don’t know the flight number or anything. I’m flying blind here.” ….

More problems trying to get him out the door from across the country:

“I knew he would call, triumphantly from the cab as it descended the hill on which he lived, and so when I still hadn’t heard from him at 9:07, I called. “Just finishing up my cereal,” he said.

“Who does that? The cab was going to leave.

“Finally, at 9:21 a.m. his time, my phone rang, and to my relief, I could hear the familiar static — the sound of the interior of a car as it brakes down a hill, the hill I grew up on: “Is this ticket paid for? What do I do at the airport?”

“Eighteen calls to get him from the door of his house into a cab. Step 1 of air-traffic-controlling a man with dementia on a voyage to Italy.” ….

Unexpected clothes problems and the specter of possible incontinence:

“My dad had arrived in Providence with no pants other than the seafoam slacks he was wearing. I hated these pants, an emblem of the futility of my efforts. In the last few years, if he was stressed or waited too long to visit a restroom, he leaked — an Alzheimer’s thing or an aging prostate thing or both. And so these ’90s-era slacks that he had somehow resurfaced from his closet were faintly discolored around the crotch. I bought him two new pairs of pants — fancy Italian ones that cost more than any I owned — and reminded him to pack them.” ….

Finally arriving in Italy:

“I had been so fixated on his pants that I hadn’t noticed his shoes. Sipping my cappuccino in Como, I saw they didn’t match: same model of Mephistos, the style he’d been wearing for 25 years, but in different shades of brown, one more reddish than the other. They were splitting at the seams and had holes in the soles. I felt deeply protective of him, and I also felt wretchedly shabby myself. My black sweater was pilled and streaked with white impasto, my 2-year-old’s yogurty mark on me. Che brutta! When did we get so raggedy, so oblivious to the world in which we lived? “Time feeds on us,” Gospodinov writes. “We are food for time.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/30/magazine/dementia-alzheimers-reminiscence-therapy.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb

If link doesn’t work for you I suggest Googling “Racing to Retake a Beloved Trip” and try opening an alternate browser/device if you don’t have access.