Download books » Biographies, Memoirs » Download EPUB On Vanishing: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear

On Vanishing: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear

On Vanishing: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear
Date: April 14th, 2020
ISBN: 1948226286
Language: English
Number of pages: 240 pages
Format: EPUB
Expanding our understanding of dementia beyond progressive vacancy and dread, On Vanishing makes room for beauty and hope, and opens a space in which we might start to consider better ways of caring for, and thinking about, our fellow human beings.

An estimated fifty million people in the world suffer from dementia. Diseases such as Alzheimer's erase parts of one's memory but are also often said to erase the self. People don't simply die from such diseases; they are imagined, in the clichés of our era, as vanishing in plain sight, fading away, or enduring a long goodbye. In On Vanishing, Lynn Casteel Harper, a Baptist minister and nursing home chaplain, investigates the myths and metaphors surrounding dementia and aging, addressing not only the indignities caused by the condition but also by the rhetoric surrounding it. Harper asks essential questions about the nature of our outsized fear of dementia, the stigma this fear may create, and what it might mean for us all to try to "vanish well."

Weaving together personal stories with theology, history, philosophy, literature, and science, Harper confronts our elemental fears of disappearance and death, drawing on her own experiences with people with dementia both in the American healthcare system and within her own family. In the course of unpacking her own stories and encounters—of leading a prayer group on a dementia unit; of meeting individuals dismissed as "already gone" and finding them still possessed of complex, vital inner lives; of witnessing her grandfather's final years with Alzheimer's and discovering her own heightened genetic risk of succumbing to the disease—Harper engages in an exploration of dementia that is unlike anything written before on the subject.

A rich and startling work of nonfiction, On Vanishing reveals cognitive change as it truly is, an essential aspect of what it means to be mortal.

Download On Vanishing: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear




Resolve captcha to access download link!

Information
Users of Guests are not allowed to comment this publication.
RSS
2019-2024. All books on the site are laid out only for informational purposes.