00:00 Boom!
00:02 [laughs]
00:04 [music]
00:06 My mom has Alzheimer's.
00:08 Lewy body dementia.
00:10 Something called frontotemporal dementia.
00:12 Evolving dementia.
00:14 We got stuck with a disease that hardly has any information about it.
00:18 Everything is so vague and it's like you could try this, you could try that.
00:22 I was looking for somebody to help and there just wasn't anybody.
00:26 I started the Stumptown Dementia blog for a lot of different reasons.
00:31 What Lickety has done with her blog is she has said,
00:35 "Let's talk about what's really going on and let's have family care partners see that I'm not the only one."
00:41 It also opened up a whole new world of other dementia caregivers who became my touchstones, my lifelines.
00:49 [music]
00:52 For about the last year of mom's life, I was like, "Oh, wouldn't it be so much fun to just get a house on wheels
00:59 and roll around the country and meet these people?"
01:02 [laughter]
01:05 Cheers!
01:07 There's so much more to dementia than they tell you in the movies.
01:12 We're going to have to see how it goes for my dad.
01:15 Right now, I think he is crying out for a break.
01:20 I don't know if she knew it was me or if she was just mad at the person that was coming in,
01:25 but she was pissed off and I was like, "Oh!"
01:28 And I never knew what to do with that because it was so not her character.
01:33 He doesn't speak much these days.
01:35 And once in a while you'll get the, "Hey, sweetie," you know, and you're like, "Oh my gosh, Dad!"
01:43 The people who he was working with had lost all respect for him
01:46 and it was really important to me to kind of clear his good name, to let everybody know.
01:51 Good news. It's dementia.
01:53 Yeah, right? I know. He's not an asshole.
01:57 The last thing you said to us was, "I'm going to bed."
02:00 You didn't say, "I'm going to go out for a two-and-a-half-hour walk."
02:03 I didn't intend it to be two-and-a-half hours. I got lost.
02:08 [music]
02:11 We're all in our own houses and our own little worlds caring for our people,
02:16 and we think we're the only ones that are doing it when there's people all over the country doing it.
02:21 We just don't know them.
02:23 Maybe this movie will be seen by enough caregivers
02:26 so that we push a generation of caregivers a little further down the road,
02:31 and then they in turn can figure out the way that they're going to let
02:34 the next generation of caregivers get a little bit of a head start.
02:37 And maybe we can all stop being so...
02:40 Blind.
02:41 Yeah.
02:42 [music]
02:44 So this is my journey to tell you the story of dementia family caregivers.
02:49 [music]
02:51 (upbeat music)
