Author Stefan Merrill Block recounts the bittersweet challenges of watching his grandmother succumb to Alzheimer's disease in his book, "The Story of Forgetting". Block was at the young age of 12 when his beloved grandmother was diagnosed with the disease, and over the next twelve years, his efforts to understand the affliction became his first novel.
Block also introduces the reader to other acclaimed works of literature focusing on not only the hardships of Alzheimer's, but on the attempt by personally affected writers, through fiction, to understand what having the disease feels like to the afflicted person; the way their minds work, and the thoughts and emotions they experience.
Block reminisces that, "I can read, in Shenk’s book ['The Forgetting: Alzheimer's: The Portrait of the Epidemic'], that Alzheimer’s is essentially a radical slowing of death—'what is usually a quick flicker we see in super slow motion.'"
Read more at: A Place Beyond Words: The Literature of Alzheimer's