When They Don’t Recognize You Anymore

GailL1 — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 00:14:32 GMT

KFF Health News - The New Old Age 04/28/2025 - When They Don’t Recognize You Anymore

from the link: [excerpts]

Stewart [the daughter in this storied example] remembers thinking, “In the natural course of things, you were supposed to die before me. But you were never supposed to forget who I am.” Later, alone, she wept.

People with advancing dementia do regularly fail to recognize beloved spouses, partners, children, and siblings. By the time Stewart and her youngest brother moved Cole into a memory-care facility a year later, she had almost completely lost the ability to remember their names or their relationship to her.

“It’s pretty universal at the later stages” of the disease, said Alison Lynn, director of social work at the Penn Memory Center, who has led support groups for dementia caregivers for a decade.

She has heard many variations of this account, a moment described with grief, anger, frustration, relief, or some combination thereof.

These caregivers “see a lot of losses, reverse milestones, and this is one of those benchmarks, a fundamental shift” in a close relationship, she said. “It can throw people into an existential crisis.”

.. . . . It’s very destabilizing,” said Kristie Wood, a clinical research psychologist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and co-author of the study. “Recognition affirms identity, and when it’s gone, people feel like they’ve lost part of themselves.”

Although they understood that nonrecognition was not rejection but a symptom of their mothers’ disease, she added, some adult children nevertheless blamed themselves.

“They questioned their role. ‘Was I not important enough to remember?’” Wood said. They might withdraw or visit less often.

topic When They Don’t Recognize You Anymore in Caregiving

When They Don’t Recognize You Anymore