Cindy Weinstein was just twenty-five when her father, Jerry, was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease in his mid-fifties. Decades later, she returned to those memories in Finding the Right Words: A Story of Literature, Grief, and the Brain, written with renowned neurologist Dr. Bruce Miller.
Cindy is the Eli and Edythe Broad Professor of English at the California Institute of Technology and an Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health. Her work brings together two worlds: the personal experience of loving a parent through dementia and the neuroscience that helps explain what is happening inside the brain.
In this conversation, Cindy and Nicole talk about anticipatory grief, the moments in caregiving that stay frozen in time, and what it means to grieve someone who is still alive. Cindy shares how studying neuroscience changed the way she understood her father, why literature helped her make sense of experiences science alone couldn't explain, and how revisiting some of her most painful memories eventually allowed her to recover the joyful ones, too.
They also explore a question at the heart of dementia caregiving: When memory, language, and recognition change, what happens to love?
This is a conversation about Alzheimer's, but even more, it's about being a daughter. About grief that doesn't follow a timeline. About keeping each other company through experiences we cannot fix. And about remembering the whole person, not simply the disease that changed them.
To learn more about Cindy and her work at https://www.professorcindy.com/
We are not medical professionals and are not providing any medical advice. If you have any medical questions, we recommend that you talk with a medical professional of your choice. willGather has taken care in selecting its speakers but the opinions of our speakers are theirs alone. Thank you for your continued interest in our podcasts.
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