💛 How Caregivers Can Fight to Preserve Dignity, Connection (AARP Article)

[Fall2025VA]

FROM THE ARTICLE.

How Caregivers Can Preserve Dignity.

Discover how acts of compassion can help caregivers uphold dignity in care.

By Paul Wynn, AARP. Published October 29, 2025.

Emma Heming Willis has spoken openly to AARP and other media outlets about her husband, Hollywood star Bruce Willis, and her mission to preserve his dignity as he lives with frontotemporal dementia. “It was a relief to finally be able to put a name on what it was. So then I could really understand what his disease is. And also be able to separate my husband from this disease,” she told Katie Couric in a recent interview about her book, The Unexpected Journey.

Her focus on protecting a loved one’s sense of self reflects a central theme in caregiving: the ongoing effort to preserve dignity as illness gradually erodes identity. It has been the guiding principle for Lois Seed since her husband, Dr. Daniel Gibbs, a neurologist, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2015. From the beginning, Seed, 74, focused on maintaining his autonomy, identity and purpose. Over the past decade, she has carefully nurtured each aspect, helping her 74-year-old husband preserve his dignity as the disease progressed to the moderate stages.

USE LINK BELOW TO READ THE ARTICLE.

https://www.aarp.org/caregiving/basics/caregivers-protect-dignity/

[GailL1]

Good article but I found one aspect of respectfully dealing with dementia to be lacking and that is when their actions become violent - physically and verbally.

This is compounded if the person already had mental illness issues from years prior and they had been weened off the antipsychotics that once were a blessing, 

What would one do if the one with dementia forgets how to eat and their wishes stipulate that they DO NOT WANT artificial feeding to keep them alive?  What’s the dignified, compassionate answer there?  

It is the harder situations that crop up that are the real problems - those are the situations that challenge one’s personal ethics code to the core as to what is right.

Kind of makes issues of bodily functions and keeping them clean seem inconsequential when the caregiver is working thru these other problems -