📚Book Tour & Guest Post 📚 Looking Past Dementia: Learning from Those Who Live with it by author Marysue Moses
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Looking Past Dementia: Learning from Those Who Live with it
Book Summary
In Looking Past Dementia, dementia educator Marysue Moses shares the powerful insights she has gained from more than twenty years working alongside individuals living with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. Through deeply human stories, she challenges readers to look beyond symptoms and diagnoses to recognize the strengths, emotions and humanity that remain.
Amazon: https://a.co/d/0azje1Jy
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/255705235-looking-past-dementia
Excerpt:
Engagement with Purpose
Here is the heart of my purpose
—William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, act 2
I well remember, long ago, walking into my bedroom to check on my twelve-month-old daughter. Eliza had been crawling around and quiet for too long. I discovered her ripping up the pages of a stack of picture books stored on an open bottom shelf of a nightstand. Grinning from ear to ear, sitting amidst a messy pile of ripped-up paper, Eliza was having a blast with her newfound activity and accomplishment.
Children are curious. Their brains are designed to pursue activities that interest them, build motor skills, and offer a sense of achievement. People living with dementia tend to lose skills in the opposite order that children gain them as they grow. Although those who experience dementia are full-fledged adults, as the condition progresses, their brains respond to their environment as though from an earlier developmental time. In her book, A Deeper Perspective on Alzheimer’s and Other Dementias, Megan Carnarius explores this progressive journey with profound insight and compassion.32
We need to stay aware that the minds of those living with dementia will seek out ways to remain engaged and to experience the satisfaction of fulfilling a purpose. We must also remember that we may or may not appreciate the plan those minds design.
Sometimes, people living with dementia channel their boredom, frustration, or lack of engagement in far more challenging directions. Many of us who have worked in memory care have encountered more than one person who packs up their belongings again and again because they feel it is time to “go home.”
When Mom moved into her first memory care community, she was a regular packer-upper, as she had gotten it into her head that she was about to be “thrown out.”
My brother thought it best to tell Mom about the impending move a few weeks before the event, but this backfired. Her feeling of being thrown out of her current home moved right along with Mom to her new place and stuck around for a while.
Over the years, I learned that in this situation, helping someone pack is often the best way to “cross to the person’s side of the street.” Then, it’s eaEngagement with Purpose
Here is the heart of my purpose
—William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, act 2
I well remember, long ago, walking into my bedroom to check on my twelve-month-old daughter. Eliza had been crawling around and quiet for too long. I discovered her ripping up the pages of a stack of picture books stored on an open bottom shelf of a nightstand. Grinning from ear to ear, sitting amidst a messy pile of ripped-up paper, Eliza was having a blast with her newfound activity and accomplishment.
Children are curious. Their brains are designed to pursue activities that interest them, build motor skills, and offer a sense of achievement. People living with dementia tend to lose skills in the opposite order that children gain them as they grow. Although those who experience dementia are full-fledged adults, as the condition progresses, their brains respond to their environment as though from an earlier developmental time. In her book, A Deeper Perspective on Alzheimer’s and Other Dementias, Megan Carnarius explores this progressive journey with profound insight and compassion.32
We need to stay aware that the minds of those living with dementia will seek out ways to remain engaged and to experience the satisfaction of fulfilling a purpose. We must also remember that we may or may not appreciate the plan those minds design.
Sometimes, people living with dementia channel their boredom, frustration, or lack of engagement in far more challenging directions. Many of us who have worked in memory care have encountered more than one person who packs up their belongings again and again because they feel it is time to “go home.”
When Mom moved into her first memory care community, she was a regular packer-upper, as she had gotten it into her head that she was about to be “thrown out.”
My brother thought it best to tell Mom about the impending move a few weeks before the event, but this backfired. Her feeling of being thrown out of her current home moved right along with Mom to her new place and stuck around for a while.
Over the years, I learned that in this situation, helping someone pack is often the best way to “cross to the person’s side of the street.” Then, it’s easy to suggest taking a break for lunch or an upcoming activity, while someone else on the team goes in and unpacks when the packer is otherwise engaged. Away from their space, the person may well forget about packing, at least for the day.
One time, a woman in our memory care called 911 for help because she felt trapped and lonesome to the point that she didn’t know what else to do.
On several occasions, another woman pulled the fire alarm. Looking back, I wonder if she acted out of desperation, panic, a desire for excitement, or a curiosity that compelled her to follow the instructions on the handle, which, of course, said, “PULL.” Regardless, it’s clear that a lack of meaningful activity influenced her choice of engagement
Guest Post
Good Grief!
Long before Charlie Brown’s gang had their own Christmas special, my family was
obsessed with the comic strip Peanuts. “Good grief!” is the phrase I most associate with the frustrations of Charlie, Lucy, Linus and company, and I love that this expression has woven its way into American English. I wonder, do people in the UK ever say “good grief!”? I doubt it. “Crickey!” and “bloody hell!” surely serve their purposes quite well.
Before I digress any further, I want to share my central point: I’m grateful for grief. Grief is good, natural, and necessary. It may not feel good, it may weigh us down, it might settle in our hearts and never leave us completely—but why should it? I bet we’d miss it if it were gone.
When someone close to us passes away, we not only feel loss; we are lost without that particular person, that presence upon whom we’ve learned to rely and perhaps have never considered the possibility of losing. And so we grieve. It’s unavoidable. As we mourn, we wonder how we will cope without an individual who means so much to us. Grief draws us toward gratitude for all that we experienced and appreciated about that person. It compels us to be more like the one we have lost. It stirs us to share what we have learned and loved about the deceased, and it gives us purpose and a call to action. The untimely deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti surely prove that.
At age 74, I have many personal losses to count: my father and mother, two older sisters, a brother-in-law, a sister-in-law, a great nephew, a high school friend, yet another friend, and my husband, Phil, who died in 2013. Phil was an actor, and he had an amazing brain. He was terrifically funny, smart, creative, and caring. We were unabashedly, deliriously happy. I spent several years after he died writing a play about him, his devotion to theatre, and our relationship. My mom died in 2008. Her dementia had ten years earlier propelled me into dementia care, which changed my life forever. When I became semi-retired in 2022, I started writing Looking Past Dementia, inspired by my mother and others living with dementia who taught me so much. Grief made both projects possible.
Grief is good. It’s normal, mandatory, and ultimately helpful. Can you imagine not feeling grief when a loved one leaves you? We need grief to reveal how we will cope with the loss, to allow the emotions it inspires to have their way with us, and ultimately to move us forward in the direction the spirit of our lost loved one is surely encouraging us to go.
By Marysue Moses, Author of Looking Past Dementia, to be released by Emerald Lake Books, August 25, 2026.
About the Author
Marysue Moses is a dementia educator, consultant and former memory care coordinator who teaches practical, creative approaches to dementia care. Drawing on both professional experience and her family's journey with dementia, she helps caregivers foster meaningful connection and engagement.
You can follow the author at:
https://lookpastdementia.com.
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61590647100255
Thank you, Joy, for posting my blog, Good Grief. Much appreciated, and all the best!!
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