Forget Memory: Creating Better Lives for People with Dementia Book

Preface ix

Introduction: Dementia Is Hard, but It Needn't Be This Hard 1

Part 1 Understanding Our Fears About Dementia 7

1 What Is (and Isn't) Memory? How a Better Understanding of Memory Might Ease Our Fears about Its Loss 13

2 The Danger of Stories: How Stereotypes and the Stigma of Aging and Dementia Can Hurt Us 25

Part 2 The Stories We Tell about Dementia in Popular Culture 31

3 Memory Loss in the Mainstream: Tightly Told Tragedies of Dementia with Science as Hero 35

4 Tightly Told Tragedies of Dementia: Then versus Now 40

5 Not So Tightly Tragic: Stories That Imagine Something More 46

6 Not Tragic at All: Stories about Memory Loss without the Old 50

7 All of the Above: Denny Crane as the Clown of Dementia 61

Part 3 Moving Through Fear: Stories About Dementia that Inspire Hope 67

8 StoryCorps and the Memory Loss Initiative 71

9 Memory Bridge 80

10 To Whom I May Concern 87

11 Time Slips Creative Storytelling Project 94

12 Songwriting Works 104

13 Dance: "Respect" and "Sea of Heartbreak" 111

14 The Visual Arts 117

15 Duplex Planet: The Art of Conversation 127

16 The Photography of Wing Young Huie 134

17 Autobiographies by People with Dementia 145

Conclusion: How and Why to Move through Our Fears about Dementia 155

Appendixes

A Program Description and Contact Information 169

B Recipes from Chapter 1 176

C Images and Stories of Dementia 178

D Timeline of Stories and Events in the Recent History of Dementia 181

Notes 187

Index 201