Something bad happened to me and my family in 2022. My wonderful wife was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s Dementia. It left my family and me in tatters.

Living with a partner with Dementia has a profound effect on every aspect of life. The Dementia not only takes away crucial capacities, but it also sucks dry the lifeblood of the carer.

This blog is about my struggle to re-establish some kind of personal harmony. The struggle has stripped away almost every belief and understanding that I had settled on from leading an examined life. What has remained is a profound sense of intuition that I find hard to explain.

Simone Weil wrote about a kind of love she called 'attention', which Iris Murdoch defined as ‘a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.’

There is a wisdom expressed in this idea of deep attention. (The word ‘attention’ doesn’t really do it justice, but let me leave that for later.) It is this that I want to explore through this blog. Ultimately, I want to convey a sense of hope that remains even in the darkest of times.

A few words about AI. I do not use AI to write or edit articles or produce images. I believe that the struggle of writing, and I do find it a struggle, helps me be attentive to my thoughts.