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Outliving Myself: On Finding I Have Vascular Dementia

June 22, 2021

Russell E. Saltzman remembers a funeral for a parishioner in his days as a Lutheran pastor, "A nice fellow," he writes, "with a plain garden variety dementia, not Alzheimer's, not the sexy one everybody knows about." He says the fellow "shrank in upon himself, became less and less of himself, shriveling and his world with him." He would sit, quietly alone, as the end approached. "Where was his memory?" Russ wonders. "Where was he?"