Newsweek writer discuss dementia:My Mother’s Case of ‘Pleasant Dementia’

By Sara Davidson | NEWSWEEK
Published Sep 13, 2008
From the magazine issue dated Sep 22, 2008
She lost her memory but gained a kind of inner peace. And after years of worry and fear, so did I.
My mother, Alice, had always been strong-willed, opinionated and demanding, a fiery real-estate agent who was a life master in bridge and a maven of musical theater. She'd told my sister, Terry, and me never to put her in a care facility. But at 93, she had advancing dementia and was living in L.A., 1,200 miles from my home in Colorado and twice that distance from Terry's in Hawaii. For years we'd put off moving her, fearing she would yell and berate us for disobeying her wishes. I trembled when the day finally came to transport Alice to a home for the memory-impaired. What I hadn't reckoned on was the radical personality change that accompanied her dementia—a condition, I learned later, known as "pleasantly demented."

It had not been pleasant, though, when Alice, in her late 80s, started forgetting the.....read the whole story