On Vanishing
Subtitle: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2020
Language: eng
Number of pages: 240
ISBN-13: 9781948226288
Description: 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.