The Alzheimer's Podcast

The Alzheimer’s Podcast

Episode 137: What’s the Value of a Human Life?

Christy Turner: As somebody who advocates for people living with dementia and their families—I or anybody else in that position should never have to make an argument about why people living with dementia are valuable enough to save.

Phil: Right.

Christy: No advocate of any kind should be in a position where they have to talk about why the population, or the segment of the population, that they are advocating for is valuable enough. When we get sucked into that, I feel like we're losing.

And it's also speaking a lot to the people who control things like essential supplies and funding and all of that kind of stuff. Because the fact that we are talking about a fellow human being ought to be enough. Full-stop.

Phil Gutis: Right.

Christy: You're listening to The Alzheimer's Podcast with Christy Turner of Dementia Sherpa, where we're all about bringing the Good Stuff --that's respect, kindness, love, empathy, and compassion--for people living with dementia, their families, and the professionals who support them.

I'm Christy Turner, AKA The Dementia Sherpa. I've enjoyed the privilege of working with over 1,500 people living with dementia and their families so far, including multiple experiences in my own family. In the course of my career, I've transformed from total train wreck on my first day as a professional to local go-to expert, speaker, trainer, and consultant. And if I can go from scared spitless to confident care partner, I promise you can, too.

This episode was recorded April 20th, 2020, and I’ve struggled with it ever since.

The Alzheimer’s Podcast typically tries to bring you actionable information so that you can make life better for your person and yourself. We might introduce you to a new book or product. Maybe a way of thinking about an aspect of dementia care partnering that will improve quality of life. Often, it’s insight from Phil Gutis, our Assistant Sherpa who’s living with a diagnosis of young onset Alzheimer’s disease.

But this episode? It does none of that. Instead, it’s me and Phil having a conversation in which we’re pissed.

We definitely talk about dementia and long-term care and Covid-19, but we don’t stop there. We also talk about politics. I understand that’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s why I hesitated to put this out into the world. I didn’t want to offend anyone. I told myself I needed to stay in my own lane and only talk about dementia-related topics.

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And then I listened to the recording one more time. And that’s when I heard the through line. What I’d originally mistaken as an angry, scattershot episode with a side helping of politics is actually an attempt to answer the question, “What’s the value of a human life?”

You probably already know I advise care partners to “always bring The Good Stuff.” You already know my core values are respect, kindness, love, empathy, and compassion. So really, you already know where I stand politically.

To those who are offended by this episode, all I can say is go in peace. This isn’t your tribe.

Phil: I just got back from my four and a half mile walk. Three days in a row now.

Christy: Are you taking dogs with you?

Phil: Charley has come for the last two, yes. The other ones are too old for four and a half miles.

Christy: Right.

Phil: So, yeah, no, it was, it's good. I'm walking with my friend Gail.

Christy: And are you staying six feet apart on your walk?

Phil: Yeah, pretty much.

Christy: Playing fast and loose.

Phil: We've been hanging out ever since—I almost consider her family at this point. We've been hanging together since the beginning of the Covids.

Christy: So, yeah, kind of playing fast and loose.

Phil: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, we've talked about this before, but after a certain point, you know, it's just like you take your precautions, you take your precautions, you wear your masks, you know, you do all this stuff, and then if it's going to happen, it's going to.

Christy: So, you're feeling rather fatalistic.

Phil: Well, yeah, I guess that's what I am. But, you know, I see people like running with masks on. And I think to myself, that's not good for you. That's really not good for you. Or the people sitting in their cars wearing masks? I just—like, I don't know. I don't know.

Christy: So, you’re mask-shaming now.

Phil: I wear my mask when I go out. I've been wearing, you know, before the government, before the state ordered us, which actually started last night [April 19, 2020]. You have to wear a mask if you're going into a grocery store or anything like that. But, I've been wearing my mask pretty consistently now. But, yeah, I just—there's gotta be a balance, you know? You can't—it's just like with Alzheimer's, you know: you gotta have a balance, right?

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You can't live in absolute fear of everything. And have you seen that—I’ll have to send it to you, if I can find it. It's a meme and this guy is like, you know, brushing his tongue, you know, washing his hands, and he goes outside and he's got the mask and the bunny suit and the gloves, and he marches out confidently and gets run over by a truck.

Christy: That's kind of how I think about running. Because you run every day and run marathons and still get hit by a bus. And that is the thing. I mean, no matter what you do, you can be hit by a bus. But we're looking at risk management, right? So, yeah, I am all about—

Phil: Risk management, right?

Christy: Yeah, exactly.

Phil: So, you’re managing the risk, but you can’t avoid the risk completely.

Christy: No, but you can do a lot to mitigate your risk, and I think that wearing a mask is completely reasonable.

Phil: Yes. I agree.

Christy: I also am one of those people who thinks staying inside is completely reasonable, or [rather] staying at home. You know, we go out into our backyard with our dogs.

I think I'm one of those people, though, that kind of generally has low social needs because it really hasn't, I don't feel like it's bothered me a ton. And you and I have talked about this, where lifestyle-wise, there hasn't been a massive change for either one of us. I think more for you because you were going to your rowing classes all the time, and then had started in the running club.

And I do not go to rowing class or running club, so that hasn't been a big change for me. Although I will say this: we moved into our new house and now we're in a rural area. And Michael and I were having lunch in the dining room the other day—‘cause now we have a dining room. Like, an official, formal dining room.

Phil: Ooh.

Christy: I know; it's pretty exciting. Anyway, the window from our dining room goes out past our front yard and then you can see the street. And like I said, there's not a ton of people out here. And so, we're sitting there eating lunch and this guy walks by. He's just walking down the road, pushing a lawnmower. And I got very excited.

I was like, “Oh, my gosh, look! There's a guy and he's got a lawn mower. Maybe he'll stop here.”

Michael said, “Well, I don't have any cash on me.”

I said, “Cash is filthy [so], who cares? Use a card.”

He's like, “Well, do you think he has a card reader?”

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I'm like, “Venmo? I don't know.”

So, we come up with this whole thing, you know, very excited, thinking this guy's going to come to our door looking for work and mow the lawn. And we've got a pretty good chunk of lawn now. And so we're super excited.

And then we felt really sad because he just kept walking. He did not, he didn't stop at our house. He just kept going. And I was like, Dang, it must—because I made a sign for the front yard that says, ‘Thank you, postal carrier, FedEx driver, UPS driver.’

And I was like, Why didn't I think to put, ‘Thank you, random person with the lawn mower’? If I had done that, maybe he would've stopped.

But anyway, yeah, I saw a cartoon from The New Yorker where a guy and a dog are on a couch looking out the window, and the man says, “I never understood before why you got so excited when people walked by.”

Michael had applied for the Paycheck Protection Program. The documents came back and he needed to print them. And this is when we found out we did not have ink in the printer and couldn't exactly zip out and go get ink because of where we live. So, he texted our Realtor and asked if she could print the documents for him and he could pick them up and she said yes.

And so, we brought her toilet paper as a thank you. Nothing says, I love you like toilet paper these days.

So, we had an extraordinarily exciting weekend.

Phil: What'd you do? What'd you do?

Christy: Well, we went to town. Two days in a row, two days in a row. So, I would say we had an exciting weekend slash living dangerously weekend because the loan documents didn't print out. Well because our realtor turns out, was running out of ink also, and so the bank said they couldn't accept those documents.

So, then we had to go to a FedEx office, which again, we're in a rural area, tiny little town. There is no FedEx office. The next closest town has about 40,000 people and a FedEx office—but doesn't do FedEx pickup on the weekends. So, we're like, okay, well that's out. The next, the closest large town, is an hour and a half away.

And so, we're like, okay, great. We just are getting ready to get onto the freeway, and we realized that that town is actually in a different time zone, so we're going to miss the cutoff. We pull over the side of the road, going through everything. Then we realize, okay, now we have to go the other direction, which keeps the time zone in our favor.

So, we head to a big town in New Mexico, but it took two hours and 45 minutes just to get there.

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I had ordered things online from Target and Office Depot—like, the ink--and they do curbside pickups, so you can come into their parking lot and hit the app and tell them, I'm here, and they'll bring your order out to your car.

Except I had ordered all that stuff in the other time zone. So now we're four hours away from the stuff that I ordered. So, yeah, it was an exhausting day and it sounds like, I mean, What a bunch of white girl problems!

We got home Saturday night, and then Sunday morning we got up and went to Amarillo and had the nice people come out to the car and put our stuff in. And I was filled with so much gratitude that there are people willing to say, “Sure, I'll come out to your car and actually put your order in your car.”

That's what blew me away. There just aren't enough thank yous for that. They were so kind. I was really impressed both at Office Depot and at Target. They were amazing.

Phil: No, I mean, the people on the front lines, and that definitely includes the retail workers.

Christy: Oh, for sure. My niece works in a grocery store. She works in a Kroger's and—it's on the West coast; it's called Fred Meyer. But, man, yeah, I think about her every day. And her husband is an EMT.

Phil: The most important question that I came up with out of your story was you have to drive almost three hours to get Chinese takeout?

Christy: No. But I've been doing a lot of cooking and a lot of baking, and it looks like we're finally past the last frost, so I still need to get the garden in and Michael cleared a spot, and I'm going to do some container gardening, too. I feel like I'm going full Little House on the Prairie and there is a vision of the future where it's conceivable I wake up to a rooster crowing or to a goat—what does a goat do? Do they bay?

Phil: Nay, nay. I don't know.

Christy: Could be. Yeah, that seems like it.

Phil: I don't know what that's called.

Christy: I don't either, other than annoying. Although I feel like maybe I could do a little side hustle and have a stand on the side of the road, like selling goat cheese or goat milk, or—

Phil: Well, with your coffee place, you can sell goat cheese.

Christy: Sure. If we get to a place in time where we can actually open a coffee shop, yes. ‘Cause that was, that was our grand plan was we were gonna open a coffee house, because the nearest coffee house is an hour and a half away. And it would be a fun thing for the tourists who are traveling Route 66 and staying here overnight, and there's a nice coffee house…but we are not really expecting a ton of tourism through here anytime soon.

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Phil: Yeah. Yeah. Well, don’t you live in an area where they're trying to liberate the state? Isn't that—

Christy: No.

Phil: No?

Christy: No. Do not disparage us. No, we have people who take science seriously here. Yeah, that is something that is just mind blowing to me. It's an interesting argument, when you take the tack that the government should not get to control what you do with your person. Irony alert!

I think there's such a difference between things I do that affect only me, my person, versus wittingly or unwittingly rolling the dice on a lot of people around me.

It's this idea of what kind of responsibility do we have toward our fellow citizens.

Phil: Right.

Christy: And I guess some people are saying none.

Phil: Yeah. The ones who are protesting. Yeah, they don't care. They really don't care. It's about them. Just like the motorcycle drivers in our town who got really pissed that the town won't let them park where they always parked.

So, they decided to fill up the town with them. They weren't wearing any masks or anything, so they just decided that, you know, their needs were more important than everybody else's.

You know, I guess that's not surprising, given the world we live in. I guess people—although, you know, when you look at the polls and the vast majority of the country does not want to reopen. It's just these loud people supported by the president to reopen. But if you're looking at the average American, no, they don't want to. They're afraid, but crazy president decides to support them, to incite violence, which I just don't….

Anytime I think about him, I just go, Deep sighs. Every time he does something outrageous, you think this is going to be the outrageous thing that's going to make everybody stand up and notice and say, He's not a good president. Nope.

Christy: Oh, golly. Yeah. I don't even remember how many things happened before kids in cages, but once—it's like if a lot of little kids in Connecticut can be slaughtered at school and nothing happens, then we know that we've crossed a line. Kids in cages—once he did that and it was okay, then I felt like, Oh, okay, there's no bottom, so I understand what to expect from here on out.

Phil: But you know, then that fatalism, you sit there and think, well—and, I'm sure people would accuse me of taking this too far, but, you know, how did the Nazis come into power and how did that all happen? And, you know, if something like that were to happen, how do

The Alzheimer’s Podcast, Episode 136: What’s the Value of a Human Life? 6 you—can you fight back? And it seems like, you know, the answer is no, you can't. But how’s that an acceptable answer?

Christy: Well, the first thing I would say is for people accusing you of taking the idea too far is number one, you're Jewish. So, on this topic, you get to say whatever you want. Number two is, that is actually, it's something that I have thought about a lot, because it's like that old, you know, first they came for the socialists and then they came for the dah, dah, dah. And when they came from me, nobody stood up ‘cause there was nobody left.

I have thought about this a lot, in the context of there were going to be scapegoats. There's a travel ban on Muslims. There has to be a border wall because Mexicans. Kids in cages. And at the forefront of my mind has always been people living with dementia. Like, what's gonna happen?

And then in the context of the Covid-19 outbreak in the United States, as soon as the Lieutenant Governor of Texas—and I'm just wildly paraphrasing here—was essentially like, “I'm totally willing to sacrifice myself and people over 70 for the good of our grandchildren so that they can have a great economy,” which obviously is dangerous—and I don't recall anybody electing him spokesperson for people over 70. So, there are a lot of issues there, but when you do take that mindset, it's death by a thousand cuts, right?

Because at one point, there was a point in the United States when banning a certain religion from traveling inside the United States would be a no-go. And there was a certain point when putting kids in cages would be a no-go. And certainly a point where you can't say the economy is better off for everybody, as long as people over 70 are willing to sacrifice themselves.

I mean, WTF?! And so as it [scapegoating] moves from one group to another, as far as why they're expendable, whatever the justification is for that, that's one reason that I have been really closely following what's happening in long-term care. And what became clear to me very early on is if you don't have widespread testing, you can't—and then, you know, on top of that, at least 25% of people are asymptomatic.

And you're in a situation where long-term care is the redheaded stepchild of the United States healthcare system. And long-term care is the home to people who are already considered second-class citizens among people living in the United States, meaning people with permanent disabilities, people with life-limiting illnesses, people with neurocognitive disorders. I mean, on and on it goes, right? People who need assistance.

To me, that just seemed like a really, really bad combination because if you're making the argument that death is acceptable, as long as it's concentrating on people who are no longer contributing to the economy, then that that says to me you're not using age as your limiting factor.

You're saying, Well, you know, long-term care costs a lot anyway, so let's go ahead and wipe out that problem. And the numbers of deaths in long-term care keep going up and up and up, and they're so underreported. Just like in the larger United States, every—the amount of people infected, the amount of deaths, are no doubt under reported.

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Because when you have arrived at a place where testing 1% of the population is some kind of achievement four months into this thing, it doesn't inspire a lot of hope or confidence in me.

Phil: Nope. What happened to our once great country? Maybe I'm exaggerating about our once great country, but you know, I just—the incompetence just seems extraordinary. And I know it just, I don't, I don't know. I can't imagine this. This is not the country that put a man on the moon, right. Can't just figure out how to do testing when every other country seems to have figured it all out.

Christy: It's kind of amazing. Right? You know, I was born four months after the moon landing, so that's just something that's baked into the cake for me. I'll never have a sense of awe like people who are older than me that remember the moon landing. But for me it was the space shuttle, ‘cause I was 11 when that happened. And that was definitely a BFD.

And so, we can absolutely accomplish great things when we throw some funding and determination behind it. And also, when we look at—all of a sudden it occurred to people, Oh, if this spreads in the homeless population, that's going to be a problem. You know what's a good idea? Let's get homeless people off the streets!

And magically, we were able to make that happen. So why weren't we magically able to make that happen six months ago, a year ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago? If we have the will to do something, it's amazing what resources can be brought to bear.

So—

Phil: And yet we don’t do it because…. Because.

Christy: I guess right now, today, my Monday mood is just more frustrated rather than infuriated. Which, you know, it'll flip to that. I alternate between those states.

Please don't talk to me about the value of every life and every heartbeat when you do not, objectively—objectively, you do not give a damn about a person attached to a heartbeat that doesn't already own a home, that doesn't have the air quotes correct color skin, that doesn't work in a certain profession, that isn't neurotypical. I mean, there are so many exclusions to this. Cut the shit.

Phil: I just, you know—if you care about the baby in the womb or the fetus in the womb, then why don't you care about it after it's born?

Christy: A question for the ages.

Phil: It makes no sense whatsoever. I mean, just absolutely no sense. But they don’t care about ‘em once they’re born. Nope, nope, nope. Then they're on their own.

Christy: Well, presumably they come out with bootstraps, so you know. Use them, right?

Phil: I really don’t understand how they think.

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Christy: Oh, I could fill a library full of things I don't understand. I really could. I don't get it either.

Phil: And you know, I—every once in a while, I try to think like, you know, ‘cause I know I live in a MSNBC/New York Times bubble.

Christy: Are you a coastal elite?

Phil: Yeah, I suppose. Every once in a while I think to myself, I'm going to try to understand. I mean, I go and I'll read or I'll—yeah, I can't watch it, but I'll go read Fox and it just doesn't make sense to me. I just—it's a completely different world view and I don't understand it. And I guess they feel the same way if they go listen to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. I guess they just—we don't operate from a shared source or a shared sense of being anymore.

I don't know. Maybe we never did. Maybe that's the naïveté that, you know—maybe I'm just being silly. But….

Christy: I don’t know. It's a very interesting thing to me because I can think of—and could definitely name names—people who I grew up with, people I'm related to, who, you know, when I was a kid, to me, they were moral examples. Not just you’re a kid, and you need to be taught things like, don't run into oncoming traffic! or whatever; all of that, but also actual moral examples.

I remember one time watching a family member just kind of—we had come out of a store and there was a homeless woman around the side of the store, and it was raining. It was cold. And she, she didn't really have anything.

And so this family member went and took blankets and heated up a pot of stew and took it to this homeless woman. That's just really an indelible memory to me. And this person now, I cannot imagine ever doing that.

Because—well, because this person now is, is aligned with the tribe of if you are homeless, it is assuredly your fault because you have no sense of responsibility or willingness to care for yourself. And it's that same line of thought where addiction is a moral failure versus a disease of the brain.

Where any type of, any type of brain health issue is all in your head rather than all in your brain—you know, a physical problem. Where if you don't have insurance, it's because you're a failure of a human and you are not worthy of having health insurance. You're essentially not worthy of life because you do not bring in enough money to afford things like food and shelter and insurance.

But that, you know, that, that homeless woman, that is just one example of so many I could cite from my childhood of the grownups around me really, you know, admiring a lot of the things that they did. And then just really wondering, like, What happened? Where was that, where was that turn? And I say this as, you know, somebody who grew up in a diverse area.

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I, I just, I don't know. So, I don't know where this is, but it's now, it's like these people that I cited as heroes in my childhood now are so much about grievance, about feeling like they have somehow been cheated by the other, the scary other. I don't even—I don't get it.

I actually had this conversation face to face with a family member, just generally a kind, loving person, but is now all in on the antithesis of that. And I just, you know, I said to this person, “Look, if I, if I wasn't your family member, if we weren't related, you would have no use for me at all. Everything that I stand for, everything that I do, you find it worthless.”

And the person didn't really have a response to that because that's, that's true. I think that, I think that crushed me even more, that it was more of a shoulder shrug, like, Yeah, probably. instead of like, you know—I really, really wanted to understand like, I feel like, there must be—because I am one of those people that's always like, There has to be some logical explanation for X, Y, or Z. Right?

So, what piece of the puzzle am I missing? Explain it to me. And I think that how we all are alike—no matter if we think Trump is the best thing that ever happened to the United States, or if we think Trump is the worst thing that ever happened to the whole wide universe—I think how we all are alike is none of us are receptive to hearing any type of information when we're being yelled at, when we're being ridiculed, when we're being made to feel like we are less than.

Phil: But you didn't, so you weren't able to get a answer to what happened. Why? Why did you change from this person I remember?

Christy: No, it turned into a, You'll understand if you watch these videos on YouTube. And it had to do with something called the—what is it, the glitterati? No, the Illuminati and, yeah, a secret society that is running the world. And I was just like—I basically started physically, slowly walking away because I was like, This seems like this could go bad real quick.

And getting back to this tribe that I try to serve, you know, for years I've said I would happily find a different line of work if dementia didn't exist anymore. I look forward to that day when I have to figure out what to do with myself because dementia doesn't exist anymore.

And I always meant that in the way of because there's a cure, right. Not because we don't give enough of a damn to save people, not because they're not worthwhile for saving because they have the diagnosis and live where they live.

Phil: Or don't have the resources.

Christy: Yeah.

Phil: Yeah. I mean, we found out yesterday that one of Tim's client’s mother died in a nursing home of Covid.

Christy: Oh gosh.

Phil: I mean, in some ways I think, given—and then, you’ve said this, you know—given how we treat the system and underfund it and all these things, it's almost impossible to imagine

The Alzheimer’s Podcast, Episode 136: What’s the Value of a Human Life? 10 how you could have avoided the fire from infecting these populations. But at the same time, you wonder, as you’ve said, did anybody really care?

But you know, at the same time, did anybody care about everything? I mean, it's just like, yeah, it's, you know, you can't—one thing you can't fault him for is caring about this for some people and not others. You know, he didn't, he just didn't care. He didn't listen. Bombs were going off all over the place, the missives, you know, they were dropping. People he trusted, they were dropping missives constantly.

Christy: Yeah. Yeah. I think this is just such a prime illustration of why empathy is such an important trait in a person. I think one of the big things that we have found out is that empathy is not universal. And to be fair, I think we knew this prior to the Covid-19 outbreak.

But it is, that's the most basic thing, I think, as far as being human goes. There's a thing going around social media, a quote attributed to Margaret Mead, being asked about how does she know when she found an advanced civilization or what was the turning point for civilization or advanced societies?

Essentially, her answer was finding evidence of a healed bone. Because that meant that at least one other person stayed with that person, helped make a splint, get that person to safety. Didn't let the herd be thinned out, meaning left for the food of a predator.

And I think that that is really true—to not have to turn it into a situation where like, as somebody who advocates for people living with dementia and their families—I or anybody else in that position should never have to make an argument about why people living with dementia are valuable enough to save.

Phil: Right.

Phil: Yep. you know, I—and maybe this is the fatalist in me, but I don't, I don't make that argument when I go in to do advocacy for additional funding for research. I make the argument that this is such an expensive disease that if we don't control it, if we don't find a treatment or cure, we're going to bankrupt our systems, and you know, I find that that actually gets much more attractions than arguing that people with Alzheimer's deserve better.

Christy: Yeah, of course it does. You're talking about money. Of course it has more impact, which is exactly my point. It is disgusting. And I wonder what the argument is going to be [going forward], because the system now has already been irretrievably bankrupted, right?

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So maybe it does give us the opportunity to come up with something better, as you've mentioned in the past. And I hope that you're right, that that is what will happen as a result of this. That we will see that things do need to be different and we can make it better.

Phil: I don’t have a lot of hope for that, but yeah. Yeah, I hope so. Right? I think we are our stupidity knows no bounds.

I think all we can really focus on is trying to undo the damage of the last four years and begin to move forward. Obama wasn't perfect. Biden won't be perfect, but the direction that we were moving in is the correct direction. And now it's just like the brakes were hit so hard, and now we're in reverse.

Christy: Yeah. I think this is probably a good time to remember what Dr. King said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” And what did President Obama say? Sometimes we have to help it. I don't remember exactly how he said.

Phil: We have to help it along.

Christy: Yeah, yeah, essentially that. I think sometimes we have to try to speed up the curve.

Phil: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I don't know what I, I don't know what I will do if my hopes are dashed on November 4th or 5th or whenever the hell we learn what the results are, because I don't know if I can do this again for four years. I really don't.

How do you, you know, getting back to that idea—what do you do? How do you—you know, if I can't change it at the ballot box, what do you do? What, what's the path forward? Oh, well, try again in eight years? I mean, four years. I don’t know.

Christy: I think you keep fighting. I think you just keep fighting because, you know, as I've seen many, many, many, black people on social media point out that—kind of a verbal pat on the head to white people—like, Oh, is life hard for you now? What's that like? You know, Go ahead, pause for a moment to wallow. Then, why don't you remember that this just feels really bad to you ‘cause you're not used to being in a really bad situation, white people.

So, for myself, I do, I go back and think about it seems like it was the summer of 2015, in particular, where I just, I remember saying, I don't even understand how black people can function. Like, black moms in particular. Like, if I had a son, I would want to keep him locked in the house because it's just like rolling the dice when they leave the house, to know if they're even going to be able to come back alive.

And that's just, you know, one tiny sliver of it, right? Of, you know, centuries of racism and literally fighting for their lives.

And then I think too, you know, one of the things I was thinking of recently is, you know, Gosh, I really miss my grandparents, which, you know, that could be on any given day. But, I'd really like to talk to them about World War II.

Like, How'd you get through that? Because there certainly must have been days where they thought, Oh crap, the whole world is falling apart. You know, one of my grandfathers was on

The Alzheimer’s Podcast, Episode 136: What’s the Value of a Human Life? 12 an aircraft carrier. One fought in the South Pacific. I mean, it just—there had to be days where, oh my gosh.

And then I heard an episode of The Daily, the New York Times’ podcast. And one of the reporters was talking to her grandma, who's in her nineties, ‘cause she wanted to talk to her and thought, “You'll have some words of wisdom, right, Gandma? For living through World War II?”

And her grandma says, “Oh, no, honey, this is a lot worse!”

And I thought, Okay. Well, you know. So, I think I will come back to what my default setting is, which is I think I'm going to have a better day—and I think anybody would have a better day, if we are grateful for the people who are fulfilling all of those essential roles out there right now from, you know, transportation, grocery stores, hospitals, long-term care, all, all of those folks, grateful for them.

Remember that everybody is really doing the best that they can, that they know how. None of us has ever been through this before. And you know, always bring The Good Stuff, because respect, kindness, love, empathy, and compassion. I promise it never makes anything worse.

Christy: And that's our show. Thank you so very much for listening. Head on over to the show notes at DementiaSherpa.com. You’ve been listening to The Alzheimer’s Podcast with Christy Turner, wishing a blessed and easy week ahead.

The Alzheimer’s Podcast, Episode 136: What’s the Value of a Human Life? 13