A Little Bit About Me
There was a lot of thinking and planning leading up to my decision to finally hit the “publish” button on this website in Autumn 2025. I hope that the sharing of my story may help other family members navigating dementia to feel less alone.
Nice to Meet You – Thanks for Visiting
My name is Anoushka (Ah-NOSH-ka). I continue to live in Edmonton, Canada – the city in which I was born and raised; and I am proudly of Goan* heritage.
I completed a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Native Studies from the University of Alberta and have spent much of my career in executive leadership roles. So I guess you can say I have a lot of real-world experience in taking a systems approach to getting things done; supporting effective relationship-building and conflict resolution; and designing creative ways to solve problems. Never would I guess these skills would come in so handy in helping me to navigate an ever-evolving relationship with my mother over the course of her experience with cognitive decline!
It was in the summer of 2022 that my dad first mentioned some observations he had about changes in my mother’s short-term memory to me – almost in passing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my initial response was one of complete denial. I did my absolute best to try and justify his observations…and soon thereafter, my own…as the outcome of life’s stressors, the natural aging process, or anything – literally ANYTHING – else that would point us away from a scary medical diagnosis. Despite the overwhelming urge to refuse the possibility that anything was truly wrong, I’m grateful that we only “wasted” a few months before we decided to talk to a trusted family doctor and start the process of testing and brain scans, which led us to formal medical diagnosis.
In April of 2023, my mother was determined to have Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). This condition is considered to be dementia-adjacent. Some patients remain on this path of intermittent short-term memory loss with no other symptoms for the rest of their lives; some progress into formal dementia. Satisfied that mom was simply unlucky, I clung to the MCI diagnosis with hope that the natural aging process had simply been overly-aggressive on mom, and that nothing would really change for our family going forward. Sadly, over the next few years, mom’s condition seemed to worsen and by May 2025, her diagnosis was changed to that of major neurocognitive disorder, one of the diseases that are encompassed within the umbrella of formal dementia. Sadly, mom died in her sleep from a massive cardiac arrest on August 28, 2025. Mom was a wonderful human being and if you’d like to know more about her, I have recreated my original tribute for her here.
The early stages of my transition from regular adult daughter into caregiver – and sometimes event parent to my own mother (!) – was frustrating, terrifying, and very lonely. To counteract these feelings, I aggressively pursued knowledge, supports, and many resources to being relief to my dad, explanation to my children, and sanity to myself and my husband. It is my hope that by sharing what I have learned to date, I can bring comfort and hope to others who may be navigating the initial stages of cognitive decline with their own loved ones, and what seems to be a never-ending progression of grief.
I am grateful to my dad for his support of me developing this website as a resource for other family members. The decision to go public with one’s story is a difficult one and as I add content, it will always be with the full permission of my family. That said, I would like to note that while I credit artificial intelligence for the win in creating this website’s structure and graphics, all words are my own.
As I will detail in one of my blog entries, mom’s condition prompted me to deeply examine my relationship to my career. To better balance my need to remain in the workforce and maintain a professional identity with my desire to be of support to my dad, I made the decision to create my own consultancy, which supports client organizations to support their approaches to corporate governance. If you are interested in learning more, you can visit my company website at marcelinomarisesolutions.com.
* Goa is a coastline state in Western India that had a long history as a Portuguese colony until its annexation into India in 1961. It is beautiful – you should visit!