The Dementia Diaries

The Dementia Diaries is the story, in journal form, of the last five months of the narrator’s mother’s life in an assisted living facility in Florida. As time goes on he begins to realize it is no longer he who can depend on his mother but she who now must depend on him for her very survival. At the same time, with her oncoming Dementia, he must cope more and more with her feelings of frustration and humiliation. If I tell her she needs to take her medication … she gets angry and wants to die, he writes. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ she says. ‘Why are you doing this to your mother?’ She begins to remind me, the narrator says, of the Exorcist when the devil takes over the priest’s mother. ‘Why do you do this to me! she screams at him. 'You are not my mother!’ the priest screams back. But he is wrong. She is his mother. She is all our mothers and we are all her sons.