Dementia is not a death. For some, it marks a new beginning | Psyche Ideas

many people with RP simply stop going after a while, deciding that it’s too upsetting to keep making scientific measurements of a process whose progress they don’t need medical equipment to observe.

Whatever our fate, we always have a choice between seeing it as a tragedy devoid of meaning, or as a possibility to achieve something positive.

Dorian Deshauer, a psychiatrist and historian at the University of Toronto, told me, “Once you abandon the idea of the personal baseline, it becomes possible to think of emotional suffering as relapse—instead of something to be expected from an individual’s way of being in the world.”