What Quality is Your Life?

There’s nothing more painful than watching a parent’s ability to function deteriorate right in front of your eyes. A diagnosis of Alzheimer’s or dementia is devastating for the person and his loved ones. The disease destroys brain cells. The person, who raised you, taught you how to walk and talk, fed you, wiped your tears and bandaged your knees, now cannot remember your name or your place in their life. Frustration grows each day as this disease slowly steals their minds, changing the essence of who they are in an insidious way.

What is it that constitutes quality of life for a dementia sufferer? Is it living life to its fullest despite physical ailments? Is it the ability to be who you always were, just in an older body? Is it feeling secure and safe? Everyone should have a life in which they feel loved and valued. Everyone wants a life in which there are stimulating things to do, activities that give pleasure, and the ability to have some control over what we do. The list of what makes life worth living varies from person to person. But when a person loses the ability to remember who loves them and what love is, when they lose the ability to have control over what they do and to remember activities that give them pleasure, then where is the quality of their life?

I read a story about a man whose grandfather was rather stern and gruff. This man thought his grandfather didn’t care deeply about anything and had no sensitivity. Then one day while the grandfather was dying from a deadly illness, this man discovered that every day his grandfather watched the sun setting. When he was ill, he would watch it from his hospital room window. Watching the sunset was something that was very important to him; it mattered and made his life worth living each day.

I don’t pretend to have all, or even any, answers. All I can say is that I think quantity of life is meaningless without quality. We tend to focus on quantity because it can be measured, but I think quality of our days is more important. I’d trade days off the end of my life if it meant that the days I did have were fulfilling, worthwhile and meaningful.

Take the time, while you still have all your faculties, to decide what kind of things are meaningful to you, what you consider to be important for the quality of your life, and let your loved ones know what makes life worth living for you. What may just be the end of a day to some might be a beautiful sunset to someone else.

Remember that you matter, because you are you, and you matter to the very last day of your life.