Can you imagine the pain and heartbreak?
This is what happened to Barry Peterson, a CBS news correspondent. He came home one day and his wife Jan, also a television journalist, didn’t recognize him. She mixed up the words in her sentences. Eventually, she had trouble even forming a sentence.
Peterson just released a book about his experience titled Jan’s Story: Love Lost to the Long Goodbye of Alzheimer’s. The memoir tells the story of Jan Peterson, who was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s five years ago, and her husband’s struggle to cope with the disease.
“In any other disease, you do say goodbye, but with Alzheimer’s you say goodbye over and over and over,” he told CNN. “I had a friend who said, ‘It’s like going to the same funeral over and over again.’”
Barry and Jan were married on Valentine’s Day 1985 in San Francisco. Thereafter, the journalists traveled the world together as they reported on wars in Sarajevo and Rwanda, and saw thousands die of a cholera outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Throughout, Barry coped.
“But the week when I had to fly from Tokyo to Seattle by myself and arrange for Jan to move into an assisted living facility, a place I was told she should probably never leave,” he writes in his book, “that was when I learned how a man can fall to the floor because he is weeping so hard.”
Jan is lucky that at the very least, Barry and his new partner serve as co-caregivers for Jan. She may not recognize Barry, but he still ensures she has companionship and proper care. Many seniors are not so lucky, as their partners may have died or their children live out of town.
Engage As You Age understands the importance of social interaction and consequently works with a range of individuals diagnosed dementia and Alzheimer’s. Our Activity Specialists are selected according to each client’s needs to ensure our employees are properly matched, trained and and prepared. Because even people like Jan still need social interaction and human connection.
Additionally, we know how taxing and exhausting being a primary caregiver to a person with Alzheimer’s can be. Providing homecare for a senior is difficult to do on your own. Our Activity Specialists can provide much-needed respite from such work. This is especially important because the research shows that the stress of serving as a caregiver can shorten that person’s life by four to eight years.
