Elliott Gould Quotes

Can I remember exactly when I 'lost' my husband? Was it the moment when I had to start tying his shoelaces for him? Or when we stopped being able to laugh with each other? Looking back, that turning point is impossible to pinpoint. But then, that's the nature of dementia.

My biggest fear is losing memory because memory is what we are. Your very soul and your very reason to be alive is tied up in memory.

My husband is stricken with dementia, and it's a trick of his condition that events and people from his past are more real to him than what happened five minutes ago.

I do mean this - I had the good fortune of being around a number of Alzheimer's patients in the last three years of my mother's life. She was in a care facility that was devoted to just people with memory-loss issues. I found those people engaging and generous in ways that I had not imagined.

None of us wants to be reminded that dementia is random, relentless, and frighteningly common.

I hate to sound this way but, 'Why me? Why me with dementia?'

I had gone through a mother having dementia in the last couple of years of her life. She was in a nursing facility in my little hometown area of northern Illinois, so I got to see a lot of other patients there in various stages of the disease. I had a firsthand exposure to it in a pretty big way.

I originally got very interested in memory in high school when my grandmother came to live with us. She had been diagnosed with dementia. It was the first time I had heard the word 'Alzheimer's disease.'

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all... Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing.

A lot of people have dementia, which is great, because then they don't recognize me.

I think everyone knows someone who's battling with dementia or caring for a relative affected by it. I've been staggered by how commonplace it is.

Although there have been warnings that it was coming for years, the Alzheimer's epidemic is here now and millions more families will be touched by this progressive - and ultimately fatal - disease unless its course can be altered.

Dementia is quite unlike cancer or heart disease or any of those other conditions where you bargain with God for a cure or even just a bit more time.

We hope we can slow or possibly reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer's.

When you deal with a person who's experiencing dementia, you can see where they're struggling with knowledge. You can see what they forget completely, what they forget but they know what they once knew. You can tell how they're trying to remember.

My mother, who died aged 82, had Alzheimer's. Losing your memory is bad enough, but everything shuts down. You can't remember how to eat or go to the toilet. It's a terrible disease and so distressing to watch it take over someone you love.

At 93, so deep in dementia that she didn't remember any details of her life, my mother somehow still knew songs.

I loved my husband very much, and it was heartbreaking to have him develop Alzheimer's disease, and to stand by and watch him decline in his ability to take care of himself.

I don't know why Alzheimer's was allowed to steal so much of my father before releasing him into the arms of death. But I know that at his last moment, when he opened his eyes, eyes that had not opened for many, many days, and looked at my mother, he showed us that neither disease nor death can conquer love.

Charlton Heston announced again today that he is suffering from Alzheimer's.

I think the earlier stages of Alzheimer's are the hardest. Particularly because the person knows that they are losing awareness. They're aware that they're losing awareness, and you see them struggling.

But I'm not as bad as Al Pacino - he doesn't even know what month it is half the time when he's working.

My mother had early-onset Alzheimer's, and it took her four years to die. She was only 44; I was 14.

The terror dementia sufferers must feel is unimaginable, but the techniques they use to hide their difficulties - the ducking and diving and keeping the world laughing - are perfectly understandable.

I regarded finding I had a form of Alzheimer's as an insult and decided to do my best to marshal any kind of forces I could against this wretched disease. I have posterior cortical atrophy or PCA. They say, rather ingenuously, that if you have Alzheimer's it's the best form of Alzheimer's to have.