
Stories, Support, and Hope
By sharing our family’s story, I seek to bring hope to others caring for loved ones with dementia; and support to those who have experienced a dementia-related loss. I also hope to build broader understanding of this disease among those not (yet) affected by it. Individual entries alternate between present-day management of my feelings of grief and learnings or remembrances of key moments from our dementia journey.
Welcome to the Soggy Sandwich Blog
A Little Bit of Context
I initially planned to start this website in the middle of 2025, when my mom was still alive and perfectly healthy. With her unexpected death in August of that year, that upended my original plans and I wasn’t sure I would proceed. I made the decision to continue on with this project a few months later. By that time, I started to think that it might also be helpful – not just in my own healing journey, but as a support to others – to chronicle both our family’s journey from first noticing something wasn’t quite right, through mom’s sudden passing, through my journey with grief following such a profound and completely unexpected loss.
As I started to write my blog entries, I decided that I would alternate timelines and rotate my material between posts about our family’s caregiving journey, and posts about my processing of grief. At the time of publishing the 30th installment in this series, I realized how confusing that might be for readers, and so I have separated entries into the two tracks for easier navigation.
I sincerely value all of the feedback I have received from readers since the launch of this site. For the ease of those of you who come back to read new installments regularly (and thank you for doing so!), entries are displayed in most recent order of publication.
Storyline 1: Our Family’s Caregiving Journey
- Chapter 35: Roller Coaster Week
- Chapter 34: Uncomfortable Observations
- Chapter 32: Small Victory Accomplished!
- Chapter 30: Cracks Start to Show
- Chapter 29: The First Follow-up
- Chapter 27: Becoming My Parent’s Parent
- Chapter 26: Vacation Time!
- Chapter 24: Project Keep Busy
- Chapter 22: Proactive Memory Preservation
- Chapter 20: The New Routine
- Chapter 18: Living with a Diagnosis
- Chapter 16: Career Conundrum
- Chapter 14: Initiating Records Management
- Chapter 12: Family Meets System
- Chapter 10: Testing, Testing…
- Chapter 8: Maybe We Should See a Doctor
- Chapter 6: Hmm…That’s Odd
- Chapter 4: Justification and Denial
- Chapter 2: The Talk That Changed Everything
Storyline 2: My Grief Journey
- Chapter 36: Thanksgiving…?
- Chapter 33: One-Month Anniversary
- Chapter 31: Mom’s Last Night With Us
- Chapter 28: Goodbye to Group
- Chapter 25: First of the Firsts
- Chapter 23: Sad Playlist
- Chapter 21: Grief Circles
- Chapter 19: Back to…Normal?
- Chapter 17: Right on Schedule
- Chapter 15: Mom’s Last Hurrah
- Chapter 13: The Day Before
- Chapter 11: Too Much.
- Chapter 9: Sad Family Outing
- Chapter 7: Unsettled
- Chapter 5: Reality Starts to Hit
- Chapter 3: The Day After the Worst Day Ever
- Chapter 1: We Begin at the End
