Family

Grief and understanding in the grip of dementia

By Brett Buckner
Staff Writer

09-21-2008

Kathleen Miller knows the pain of dementia. She's witnessed it firsthand.

Growing up, Miller had an aunt who worked as a "brilliant" physicist. The two swapped letters back and fourth until one day, Miller received a letter that would help to change the course of her life.

It would be the last letter her aunt ever sent.

"I'm losing ground," the woman wrote. "I've got the worst illness imaginable. I'm losing my ability to think."

What Miller's aunt had was a form of dementia. Someone who had spent their lives in intellectual pursuit had to sit back and watch it all slip away.

"I'll never forget that," Miller said recently, sitting in the lobby of Suite 301 in the Physicians Center at Regional Medical Center. "No one should have to go through that."

For almost 10 years, Miller has worked with patients and loved ones as a certified dementia trainer and master's prepared therapist with RMC. She also leads a weekly dementia support group in Suite 301.

"It's a slow, progressive, insidious disease," Miller says. "And sadly, it often ends the same. The person loses all capacity. They become bedridden and then they die."

What makes dementia and Alzheimer's so horrible is that it destroys families who must sit back and watch as the person they love simply slip away.

"With families … initially they grieve with the person, but then they lose that person even though they're still alive," Miller says. "They're left to grieve alone because the person with the disease reaches a point where they're simply unaware.

"It's really the family that suffers."

While it's difficult to know specifically what causes dementia, there is one obvious harbinger — aging. As medical advancements allow people to live longer, the risk of such illnesses increase, Miller says, adding that 45 percent of people who live to be 80 will have some form of dementia.

"And by the year 2050, if we don't find something to cure this," she says, "that number is going to quadruple."

For those diagnosed with dementia, there are medications that can slow the regression. But once it's started, nothing can be done to stop it. Friends and family must try to understand the disease while creating a safe and loving environment.

"You can't go by who they were," she says. "You have to go by who they are."

As for everyone else, Miller says the only way to combat dementia is to remain as mentally sharp as possible.

"It's a proven fact that if we keep ourselves as physically fit as possible and keep our intellectual abilities keen, we'll keep our acumen longer," she says. "But at some point, we're all going to face this. Either it'll happen to us or to someone we love.

"It's just a matter of time."