One Couple's Passage Through the Straits of Dementia
Until it comes into our own home, it is easier to think of people with dementia as cute grandmotherly types with a faulty memory of whom we tell amusing anecdotes while we smile condescendingly, though perhaps uncomfortably, behind our hand. But… these people are not merely numbers. They are our mothers and fathers, our husbands and wives, our sisters and brothers, our neighbors, our friends. They are us.
And they, with their caregivers, fill the pages of The Pilothouse. From the moment Woody comes face-to-face with his disease, through his no longer being able to conceal it, through Vida’s evolution of caregiving, to the inevitable end, we accompany Vida and Woody on their passage through the straits of dementia, meeting many other dementia sufferers and their caregivers along the way.
With laughter and tears, information and hope; stripping away shame and embarrassment, The Pilothouse highlights many of the faces that comprise the befogged world of Alzheimer’s and related dementias, filling an empty niche in the narrative of these devasting diseases. It is a story for our time.
