This blog is all about the effects of dementia and Alzheimer's.  A person with dementia has faulty judgment and mild changes in personality, while a person with Alzheimer's is slow in speech and their memory loss gets worse over time. Some forms of dementia can be reversed and managed with medication and Alzheimer's cannot, there is no cure for it. Dementia is a syndrome while Alzheimer's is a disease which affects the person as much as their family and friends. 
 

In Death of a Salesman, Willy's actions show us that he could have dementia. Dementia affects mental cognitive tasks such as memory and reasoning, we notice Willy's memory going when he forgets how to drive and starts getting angry at certain things that he can't do anymore. I can connect this part of DOAS to my life because my Papa who passed away in November 2018 had Alzheimer's and it affected his life and my families significantly. Like Willy, my Papa's memory started to fade about a year and a half ago, my family thought it was memory loss from old age so we didn't do anything about it right away. My Nana was taking care of him in their house which was very hard for her but she wanted to do it for him. My Nana had to go to the hospital so this is when we moved my Papa to a temporary home. At this point, my family knew he had Alzheimer's so we moved him to Amica in Unionville. This home was permanent and was very helpful since my Nana wasn’t able to take care of him and herself because that would be too much work for her. 
 

The worst part about Alzheimer's, it, in my opinion, is that it gets worse over time, every day is different with an Alzheimer's patient, one day they can be very responsive and the next they could have trouble eating and not talking at all. With my Papa, the best days I had with him were when he sang with my family which is one thing he loved to do and I will always remember that.