I am not someone who arrived at this work through a clean and easy path. I arrived through loss, accountability, and the slow work of rebuilding. But before any of that, I arrived through a grandmother named T-one, who taught me the most important thing I know about this disease before I had any language for it at all.
Where It Started
She was there before the disease was.
I am the oldest of six. When I was seventeen, my grandmother moved in with our family because she needed help. She had Alzheimer's Disease. She would live with us for the next ten years, until she passed. We called her T-one.
Before she moved in, I knew her the way grandchildren know their grandmothers. She was a person with a whole life, and I was a child who got to be inside it. When the disease came, she was still that person. But we had to learn how to find her.
We learned the hard way, the way most families do. I remember the early instinct to correct her. To remind her that she did not live in her old house anymore, that she lived with us now. It seemed like the right thing to do. It was not. Every correction landed like a small grief. She would cry, and the room would go quiet in the particular way it does when someone is lost and cannot say so.
What worked was something different. T-one's favorite song was “The Lady in Red.” Singing it brought her back. So did walks in the yard, and the elaborate stories we told about where our dog came from, and watching her feed that dog ice cream like she was sharing a secret. These were not distractions. They were doors. When we stopped trying to pull her into our reality and started meeting her in hers, something shifted.
Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile is the source of your joy. I watched that happen with T-one. The worried smile she always wore, the one forever trying to push past her anxiety, would soften into something real. She smiled her way back to herself, not because the confusion had lifted, but because someone was present with her in it.
That is the thing I learned at seventeen that no training has ever displaced. Getting it wrong was not the danger. Losing the connection was. When I stopped trying to be right and started trying to stay present, she came back to me. Not all the way, not always. But enough. Every time, enough.
That is where this work started. Not in a classroom, not in a clinical rotation. In T-one’s worried smile and what it took to reach the one underneath it.
Who I Was
A practitioner my community called on.
For most of my adult life I was someone my community called on. I was a psychiatric nurse practitioner who built and ran a busy practice in Lafayette, seeing patients in crisis every day. A significant part of that work involved people living with dementia, particularly those whose behavior had become difficult to manage and whose families were running out of options. I did other things too, like work on legislation that increased access to care and run grant-funded programs for people dealing with addiction. I showed up. I believed the work I was doing mattered.
I understood suffering professionally, and I thought that was enough. It was not. I had never faced it from the inside, and I did not know the difference until I did.
What Happened
The wave of addiction.
The pandemic was harder on me than I let on, to anyone, including myself. The pressure was relentless and I had no language for what I was carrying. The stress became so overwhelming that I turned to alcohol to cope. Alcohol then turned to other substances. This became my way of getting through the day, until they became something I could not see clearly anymore.
My actions hurt a lot of people, especially my family. I made decisions I cannot fully explain and would not try to excuse. In February 2022 I was arrested. I did not fight what was true. I took responsibility for what I had done. That is the thing about addiction. It weaves a web that is a complete mystery to everyone watching. You can only see how mysterious that web is when you are out of it. There is no explanation to defend. It just is.
What Came After
Finding myself.
I went from being arrested to four months of treatment, and I have been sober since February 2, 2022. My nursing licenses were suspended and ultimately surrendered. My practice was gone. My name, in the community where I grew up and built a life, was no longer what it once was.
I am beyond grateful that my family is still intact, and I want you to understand what that meant. Rebuilding my life with my wife, with my three children, has been one of the greatest gifts of getting sober. I get to be present with them as the best version of myself, the version they deserved all along. Our marriage is real now in ways it was not before, and that is not something I take lightly.
Today I am active in the recovery community in Lafayette, and it has truly saved my life. I work with other men and tell my story in treatment centers. I am accountable to people who will not let me disappear into myself again.
What brought me back to this work was not a decision. Sitting with other men in recovery, in the hard places, I felt something I had not felt in years, but only after I had stopped long enough to find myself first. The pull toward dementia work was a recognition of something I understood long before I lost my way. The people who need the most from us are the ones the world has already written off.
That was four years ago.
Why This Work, and Why Now
What Kitwood understood.
Tom Kitwood spent his career arguing that the most dangerous thing we can do to a person with dementia is reduce them to their worst moments, their most difficult behaviors, their diagnosis. He called it malignant social psychology: the slow wearing away of a person’s standing in the eyes of the people around them. The person disappears behind the label, and everyone is worse off for it.
I know what it is to be reduced to your worst moment. I know what it costs, and I know what it takes to remain a person inside of it. That experience does not make me a saint. It makes me someone who will not flinch when things get hard, who will tell you the truth even when it is uncomfortable, and who understands that the person your family is caring for is still entirely there, even when it does not feel that way.
That is why I do this work. And that is why I wanted you to know my story before we begin.
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