Anthony Cordasco (caregiver)

How does a person go from devoted Shepard, winning best New Jersey wool fleece three years in a row, to someone who confuses deer with sheep?

How does a spinning and weaving instructor fail to recognize the tools she once used?

How do family filled holidays become lonely times spent alone?

How does every memory of the past and hope for the future become forgotten and impossible?

In one word, dementia; in three, Frontal Temporal Degeneration.

Most memories are gone, cognitive ability is childlike, social filters are missing, empathy is lost. What makes a person a person, is destroyed.

A lover of animals becomes disinterested, an artist becomes silent, a baker and cook needs to be waited on, a spouse becomes a responsibility, a friend becomes a stranger.

The demands and repetition and loss borne alone each day are overwhelming, but the disease gives no options; being a caregiver consumes the days that, at one time, were going to be our golden years.

– Anthony Cordasco