Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life With Alzheimer's
by Thomas DeBaggio Forgetting the names of the plants he sold worried DeBaggio. He had good reason. At 57, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, which had already begun to eat its way through his memory and concentration. The only positive DeBaggio sees in Alzheimer's is his chance to write a book on the topic. Starting the day he was diagnosed, DeBaggio writes about his life, before and after Alzheimer's. He writes about his family and his business, he writes about the depression that hit himself and his wife with Alzheimer's, and he sticks in a study on Alzheimer's every few pages.
The result is a book without chapters or much order. All of the bits of DeBaggio's narrative fit together, but none fit perfectly. Sometimes an incident is told more than once, in present tense and past tense, and not in chronological order. Perhaps this is a reasonable thing to expect from a book written by a person with Alzheimer's. Some of the studies seem to contradict themselves, and DeBaggio does not explain them.
Serious reading.
