The Path
That Goes Through
A Mountain Guide for the Journey Through Cognitive Change
Not every path goes through. But there is one that does—leading to identity preserved, relationships deepened, and new capacities discovered.
If You’re Reading This in Crisis
Start here if you’ve just received a diagnosis or are in hospital.
These sections will help you stabilise and take your first steps.
Quick Links:
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The Choice at the Mountain’s Base (understanding your options)
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If You’re Reading This Post-Diagnosis (immediate next steps)
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Moving Forward: Your First Steps (what to do today)
Welcome to Base Camp
When you receive a diagnosis of cognitive change, it can feel like standing at the base of a mountain. Many paths lead upward, but not all of them go through. Some end at impassable cliffs, others fade out before reaching the summit.
Any good expedition leader will tell you that when you look up at a towering peak and feel small, even overwhelmed, the mountain cannot be climbed all at once. Progress comes camp by camp. Basecamp is the first mountain. Then Camp 2. Then the next. Only in this way are the great Himalayan peaks climbed.
But the path you choose now matters. It will determine not just how you travel, but whether you can complete this journey with your personhood intact.
This guide exists because someone needs to tell you the truth: not every approach to dementia leads where you need to go. But there is a path that does — one that goes all the way through. To a summit where identity remains, relationships deepen, and unexpected capacities emerge.
I know, because my mother Betty and I walked it for seven years. And now I can show you the way.
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Part 1: Crisis Foundation
and Path Selection
At the mountain’s base, the path ahead is not yet clear
After a diagnosis, various routes are offered — medication, memory training, behavioural techniques, or waiting for the next breakthrough. Each has value, but most do not carry you all the way through.
Part 1 helps you choose wisely. It reveals why some trails end in dead ends, introduces the complete path that integrates psychosocial, environmental, spiritual, and medical dimensions, and offers stabilising steps for your first days and weeks.
This is the orientation camp: where clarity begins, footing is found, and the climb becomes possible.
The Choice at the Mountain's Base
Why Most Paths Don't Go Through
"We must move beyond the dominance of the biomedical model to embrace psychosocial interventions as first-line treatments."
—The Lancet Commission on Dementia Prevention, Intervention, and Care (2020)
Standing at your diagnosis, you could be offered multiple paths:
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The Medical Management Trail: Promises to slow your descent, measures success by delayed decline
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The Behavioral Technique Route: Offers coping strategies, communication tips, daily structure
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The Memory Exercise Path: Cognitive training, brain games, mental gymnastics
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The Pharmaceutical Hope Track: Wait for the breakthrough drug that's perpetually "five years away"
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The Experimental Drug Trial: DMT and other experimental pharmaceuticals that offer partial solutions
Each path has merit. Each offers something valuable. But here's what no one tells you: These paths alone don't reach the summit.
They can dead-end at different elevations:
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When medication stops working or has side effects that make it not worth taking
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When techniques fail because you've changed in ways they don't account for
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When memory exercises become sources of frustration rather than help
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When the promised breakthrough doesn't come but your journey continues
The Path That Goes Through
The complete path requires four dimensions from the very beginning:
Psychosocial: Not just managing behaviors but maintaining your relationships and identity through every change. This means understanding that your consciousness extends far beyond cognition, that who you are lives in relationship as much as in individual memory.
Spatial/Environmental: Recognizing that your environment shapes your experience more than disease progression does. Betty could struggle repeatedly on busy sidewalks but walk confidently by the river at dawn, radiant in her purple fleece jacket, finding poetry in bird songs. Same person—completely different outcomes based on place.
Spiritual: Not religious (though it can be), but acknowledging that something in you transcends biological function. This dimension recognizes that as cognitive channels close, consciousness doesn't diminish but reorganizes, often opening to experiences our culture doesn't have language for.
Medical Integration: This path doesn't reject medical support but provides the essential dimensions medicine cannot address alone. Medications may help with specific symptoms. Medical care manages physical needs. But only psychosocial, environmental, and spiritual dimensions integrated with medical care can lead to the summit.
How to Recognize a Dead-End Path
Some approaches offer support for a time but eventually stop where your journey continues. Here’s how to recognize when a path is leading to a dead end before it’s too late.
Warning signs that a path will not carry you through:
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Focuses only on slowing decline with no vision for what might emerge in you
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Measures success only by what you preserve, not what you might discover
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Treats your spiritual experiences as symptoms to manage rather than developments to honor
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Offers techniques but no transformation
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Promises to fight your journey rather than help you navigate it consciously
The path that goes through doesn't promise to stop cognitive change. It promises to help you discover what becomes possible because of it, not in spite of it.
If You're Reading This in Hospital/Just Post-Diagnosis
You need immediate, actionable steps:
Today (First 24 Hours):
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Refuse nothing, accept nothing - make no major decisions for 72 hours
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Your brain is in shock; this is normal and temporary
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Ask medical staff to speak slowly and provide written summaries
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Have someone you trust take notes during all conversations
Tomorrow (Day 2):
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Find one place where you feel most yourself
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Often this is nature (garden, park, by water) or familiar home spaces
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Spend at least one hour in this place without medical discussions
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Notice what capacities remain strong when you're in supportive environments
Day 3:
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Identify one person who sees this as your journey, not just a medical condition
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This might be family, friend, spiritual advisor, or healthcare provider
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Someone who asks "How are you?" not just "How is your memory?"
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Begin building your accompaniment network
Day 4-7:
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Begin the first steps outlined in "Moving Forward: Your First Steps"
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Start one simple daily practice from the options you'll find ahead
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Connect with others who've walked this path successfully
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Remember: Crisis stabilization comes first, comprehensive framework implementation comes later
The Spiritual Dimension (Essential but Universal)
Consciousness Trumps Cognition
When rational understanding begins to fade and familiar landmarks of memory blur, something else often emerges—a different way of knowing that transcends ordinary boundaries. The medical model typically offers only two responses: hallucination or delusion. Medicate or redirect. But what if neither label is adequate? What if what's emerging requires spiritual recognition, not medical intervention?
Betty's Dawn Clarity
At 4:46 AM, Betty sat on the edge of her bed with Martin Luther's biography on her bedside table, her pearls gleaming even at this pre-dawn hour. Despite a MoCA score suggesting someone who should barely engage with the world, here she was, wrestling with one of history's great theological minds. "He was definitely called by God," she said with sudden clarity. Then, looking directly at me: "And you are too, Mark."
This was Betty's faith at work—not confused rambling but essential navigation through cognitive change. When she declared "There's a God in heaven and he said that you would stay with me and help me. That's why I'm still here!" I replied, "And I guess that's why I'm here as well then." We both laughed. Betty wasn't delusional—she was anchored in something that transcended neurological change.
Faith as Foundation
I did not hold the same beliefs as Betty, but over time my more nature-based spirituality merged into Betty's way of moving in the world, and her Christian faith became more clear to me. But we still had our own ways. I saw that Betty's faith was a stronger foundation than mine, and that she needed her foundation through this crisis of cognitive change more than ever. I knew it was her own faith that would see her through, not anyone else's—no matter how valid theirs might be. So I became a fierce advocate for protecting and supporting Betty's faith and beliefs, even when at times they contradicted my own. I kept caregivers away who promoted their own beliefs rather than simply and deeply living from them.
During our evening conversations, she'd tell me she had "vouchsafed" me with Jesus Christ—not as theological claim but practical protection, like a mother ensuring her child knows where the spare key is hidden, just in case. Her straightforward faith offered something more sophisticated theology couldn't match: unshakeable trust in being "looked after" no matter what came.
If you're experiencing things others call symptoms but you sense might be more, you're not alone. Your expanded awareness may be real, not pathological.
Found in Every Tradition, Owned by None
The spiritual dimension of your journey appears across traditions:
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Christianity: Betty reading Martin Luther at dawn, finding God's calling in everything, maintaining faith that sustained her through cognitive change's deep waters
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Present-Moment Awareness: Like Mary Oliver's "idle and blessed—I don't know exactly what a prayer is / I do know how to pay attention"—Betty inhabited each moment completely
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Multiple Realities: Betty lived simultaneously as devout Christian and nature mystic, praying to Jesus while speaking to birds "the way they liked to hear," holding paradox without confusion
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Indigenous Wisdom: Like Aboriginal songlines connecting identity to landscape, Betty's sense of self remained anchored to spatial and relational networks that transcended individual memory
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Buddhism: Present-moment awareness naturally emerges as past and future become less accessible
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Secular Humanism: The mystery of consciousness persisting despite neurological change
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Judaism: The Shekhinah (divine presence) dwelling with those society considers "diminished"
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Islam: The soul's journey becoming visible as the ego's defenses dissolve
You don't need to believe in God. You don't need any religious framework. But you do need to acknowledge that your consciousness is more than neurons firing, that something essential in you persists even as your brain changes.
Why This Dimension Can't Be Skipped
Without spiritual recognition:
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Your emerging experiences get labeled as symptoms
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Insights get medicated away
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Your spiritual development gets pathologized
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Family members miss the sacred dimensions of what you're experiencing
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Your journey becomes only about loss, never about opening
Life Force Celebrating Itself
Betty taught me this when she danced before yet another medical appointment, Celtic music filling the house as she performed the Charleston in her nightgown. "You're doing a little jig before your blood transfusion?" I asked. "Yeah!" Her joy was infectious. "Perhaps that means you don't need the blood transfusion—you're bursting with energy," I replied. Her iron levels were very low. We went ahead with the blood transfusion, but where did that energy come from? Joy? A spiritual realm? I learned to see life force celebrating itself despite medical crisis.
She showed me again when declaring at the grocery store: "We've got to sing to win! And we're going to go to church. I'll ask God the Father, so you'll see, we're going to win!" Then adding with a grin: "And we're going to try to be very good people for a change." Betty spent hours talking about how we would give the money away. I don't know how she remembered all the deserving people—even our beloved Stouffville Whitchurch Museum was a beneficiary. Cognitive change made Betty poor at calculating odds; she really believed she'd win. It fulfilled Betty's need to provide for others in need. This wasn't confusion—it was faith remaking a simple lottery ticket purchase into sacred calling.
Was it her faith or her limited cognition that made her believe she'd win—does it matter?
Those lottery tickets are still in a drawer. It was the process that mattered. We were already winners, and I guess I don't have the same faith.
Consciousness Transcends Cognition
Most clearly, Betty demonstrated that consciousness transcends the material realm. While neurological tests showed progressive deterioration, she simultaneously experienced her greatest spiritual growth. Her declaration "The birds are singing the light into the world" emerged from communion consciousness where causation flows in circles, not in linear logic.
You have the right to have your expanded experiences honored rather than automatically treated as problems requiring medical intervention. Your spiritual journey through cognitive change may be the most important work of your life.
Moving Forward: Your First Steps
Week One: Orientation at Base Camp
Day 1-2: Assess Your Current Path
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What approach are you currently following?
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Does it address psychosocial, spatial/environmental, AND spiritual dimensions?
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Where might it dead-end based on what you now understand?
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Who in your life sees this as your journey rather than just a medical condition?
Day 3-4: Your Capacity Inventory
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List current areas where you need more support (sequential tasks, complex planning, detailed memory)
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Identify what support systems might help with each challenging area
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Notice your emerging or persistent strengths (emotional awareness, aesthetic sensitivity, present-moment experiences, relational connections)
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Begin steering toward what flows naturally while accepting help for what's difficult
Day 5-7: Your Environmental Audit
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What in your environment supports wonder, beauty, and natural rhythms?
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Where can you regularly access nature without time pressure or performance expectations?
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How can you increase meaningful beauty in your daily surroundings?
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What places serve as anchors for your identity and comfort?
Building Your Support Structure
Week 2: Finding Your Accompaniment Partner
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Someone who sees your journey as consciousness development, not just medical management
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Willing to promise systematic support for challenging areas while encouraging your emerging capacities
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Understands distinction between accompaniment (walking with you) and caregiving (managing for you)
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Can hold spiritual dimensions without fear or pathologizing
Remember: You deserve accompaniment that honors who you're becoming, not just management of who you're apparently losing.
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Part 2: Navigation Framework
and Daily Practice
Your Hemisphere Journey
Navigating shifting strengths and supports
Partway up the mountain, balance becomes everything.
Some capacities begin to require more support, while others remain steady or even grow stronger. This stage introduces a framework for navigating those shifts — offering daily practices, accompaniment promises, and guidance for leaning into what still flows naturally. Here, the climb steadies into rhythm, and surprising strengths often begin to emerge.
The Honest Map of Your Shifting Capacities
"Support what’s fading, strengthen what’s emerging"
In the 1970s, Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize for mapping how our brain's two hemispheres specialize in different functions. While neuroscience has refined his work, the basic insight remains: different brain regions support different capacities, and they don't all change at the same rate during your journey.
Functions That May Require More Support Over Time:
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Linear time perception and sequential task management
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Complex language production and detailed comprehension
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Mathematical reasoning and analytical processing
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Multi-step planning and organizational thinking
Your Capacities Often Remaining Resilient or Emerging:
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Spatial awareness and navigation by meaningful places
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Emotional depth, resonance, and interpersonal attunement
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Musical and artistic perception and expression
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Pattern recognition and intuitive knowing
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Present-moment awareness and holistic consciousness
The Support Promise You Deserve
Support that enables rather than restricts.
Here's what changes everything: Instead of measuring yourself by what's becoming more challenging, you need someone who promises:
"For every area where you need more support, I will provide that support—so you can explore what's emerging in you."
This isn't caregiving alone—it's cognitive scaffolding, or what I call Accompaniment that allows you to release what's requiring more and more effort while embracing what's flowing naturally. When Betty needed help with sequential tasks like medication management, food preparation and eventually personal hygiene, I handled those details so she could dwell fully in artistic expression, spiritual awareness, and the remarkable present-moment consciousness that was expanding in her.
We all deserve support that enables rather than restricts our emerging capacities.
Practical Balance Navigation
Early, middle, and later stages of the climb.
Early in Your Journey: Begin cultivating resilient capacities while consciously accepting support for challenging areas
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Spend time in nature without agenda or time pressure
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Engage with music, art, poetry as expression rather than performance
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Practice present-moment awareness during daily activities
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Value your emotional truth over factual precision
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Trust your intuitive knowing alongside logical analysis
Middle of Your Journey: Actively steer toward what's flowing while systematically getting support for what's difficult
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Navigate by meaningful places rather than abstract schedules
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Express through art/music/movement when words become effortful
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Trust your emotional communication over verbal complexity
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Let others handle sequential tasks while you engage spatially and relationally
Later in Your Journey: Fully inhabit the world of presence, connection, and immediate experience
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Dwell completely in current moments rather than past or future
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Communicate through touch, tone, energy, and shared presence
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Experience reality as unified rather than separated into categories
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Access spiritual dimensions without cognitive mediation
What This Actually Looks Like
As time progressed Betty couldn't manage many of what they call the "Activities of Daily Living" ADL, but she could tell exactly who needed comfort in a coffee shop full of strangers. She couldn't remember a few minutes before, but she knew precisely when our evening ritual phrase "Over to Dover" meant it was time to transition peacefully to sleep. She couldn't track linear time, but she felt familiar places with perfect awareness of natural rhythms—responding to her environment with a sophisticated understanding.
"I have Second Sight now," she explained one evening. "I see the past and future all at once, in no particular order. It's confusing for you but not for me." This wasn't confusion—it was a different way of experiencing time that mystics have described for millennia.
You too may discover that in 'time' your awareness operates on different rhythms and recognizes patterns others miss.
What Emerges on Your Path
Presence, emotional richness, creativity, spirituality.
Present-Moment Mastery: Freedom from Time's Prison
When memory of past and projection of future become less dominant, something remarkable can happen: complete presence. Buddhist meditation masters spend decades trying to achieve what you might experience naturally.
Betty's daily coffee ritual evolved over our years together. What began as lukewarm thermos coffee became a celebration of perfect-temperature coffee served in fine china on park benches throughout the Rouge Valley. "Hot coffee in fine china!" she would exclaim with genuine delight every single morning. This became daily proof that some experiences were actually improving during cognitive change, not just declining.
This wasn't forgetting her past or inability to plan. She was freed from the tyranny of linear time into the eternal now that mystics describe. Each moment became complete in itself. "This is the best day I ever had!" she declared almost daily for three years—and she meant it every time.
You may discover that your relationship with time becomes more spacious, more present, more alive.
Emotional Richness: Love Beyond Logic
As logical processing becomes more challenging, emotional intelligence often intensifies. Betty could read the emotional weather in a room with stunning accuracy. She knew who was sad, who was pretending, who needed comfort—all without analytical assessment.
"That lady is broken-hearted," she'd whisper about a stranger in a café. Sure enough, gentle conversation would reveal a recent loss. "You're worried about something," she'd tell me, even when I thought I was hiding it perfectly. This emotional attunement created connections that transcended any cognitive loss.
During our evening care routines, when I would rise at 2 AM and 5 AM to help her, she never demanded this care, but her peaceful acceptance and whispered "thank you, dear" created a relationship depth I'd never experienced before. When her evening caregiver Rhonda was with her, I would return to find Betty "clean, peaceful, sitting on the couch in fresh nightclothes, eagerly anticipating my return"—relationship as medicine.
The quality of your relationships may deepen in ways that surprise everyone, including yourself.
Artistic and Aesthetic Emergence: Creating from the Source
Many people discover creative capacities during cognitive change that seem to appear from nowhere. At 84, Betty began painting watercolors without any previous training—not copying techniques but creating from some deep source that didn't require cognitive planning. Her paintings captured essences: the feeling of wind, the personality of trees, the mood of water.
Other families report similar emergences:
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Musicians who can't read notation but improvise for hours
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Writers who lose grammar but find poetry
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Engineers who can't calculate but see patterns everywhere
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Teachers who can't lesson plan but become wisdom keepers
This isn't preservation of old skills—it's emergence of capacities that analytical thinking may have previously constrained.
Spiritual Connection: Your Expanded Awareness
Perhaps most remarkably, many people experience what Celtic tradition calls "thin places"—where the boundary between this world and something larger becomes permeable.
Betty's evening reflections revealed this expanded awareness. "I'm becoming an angel," she told me one night. "Can't you see my wings starting?" The medical model would hear psychosis. I learned to hear spiritual emergence. "The birds understand my language now," she observed—and remarkably, they did seem to respond to her melodic communications in ways they never did to regular speech.
If you're experiencing expanded awareness, spiritual visitations, or consciousness that seems to transcend ordinary boundaries, these may be valid spiritual developments rather than medical problems.
Present-Moment Mastery: Freedom from Time's Prison
When memory of past and projection of future become less dominant, something remarkable can happen: complete presence. Buddhist meditation masters spend decades trying to achieve what you might experience naturally.
Betty's daily coffee ritual evolved over our years together. What began as lukewarm thermos coffee became a celebration of perfect-temperature coffee served in fine china on park benches throughout the Rouge Valley. "Hot coffee in fine china!" she would exclaim with genuine delight every single morning. This became daily proof that some experiences were actually improving during cognitive change, not just declining.
This wasn't forgetting her past or inability to plan. She was freed from the tyranny of linear time into the eternal now that mystics describe. Each moment became complete in itself. "This is the best day I ever had!" she declared almost daily for three years—and she meant it every time.
You may discover that your relationship with time becomes more spacious, more present, more alive.
Emotional Richness: Love Beyond Logic
As logical processing becomes more challenging, emotional intelligence often intensifies. Betty could read the emotional weather in a room with stunning accuracy. She knew who was sad, who was pretending, who needed comfort—all without analytical assessment.
"That lady is broken-hearted," she'd whisper about a stranger in a café. Sure enough, gentle conversation would reveal a recent loss. "You're worried about something," she'd tell me, even when I thought I was hiding it perfectly. This emotional attunement created connections that transcended any cognitive loss.
During our evening care routines, when I would rise at 2 AM and 5 AM to help her, she never demanded this care, but her peaceful acceptance and whispered "thank you, dear" created a relationship depth I'd never experienced before. When her evening caregiver Rhonda was with her, I would return to find Betty "clean, peaceful, sitting on the couch in fresh nightclothes, eagerly anticipating my return"—relationship as medicine.
The quality of your relationships may deepen in ways that surprise everyone, including yourself.
Artistic and Aesthetic Emergence: Creating from the Source
Many people discover creative capacities during cognitive change that seem to appear from nowhere. At 84, Betty began painting watercolors without any previous training—not copying techniques but creating from some deep source that didn't require cognitive planning. Her paintings captured essences: the feeling of wind, the personality of trees, the mood of water.
Other families report similar emergences:
-
Musicians who can't read notation but improvise for hours
-
Writers who lose grammar but find poetry
-
Engineers who can't calculate but see patterns everywhere
-
Teachers who can't lesson plan but become wisdom keepers
This isn't preservation of old skills—it's emergence of capacities that analytical thinking may have previously constrained.
Spiritual Connection: Your Expanded Awareness
Perhaps most remarkably, many people experience what Celtic tradition calls "thin places"—where the boundary between this world and something larger becomes permeable.
Betty's evening reflections revealed this expanded awareness. "I'm becoming an angel," she told me one night. "Can't you see my wings starting?" The medical model would hear psychosis. I learned to hear spiritual emergence. "The birds understand my language now," she observed—and remarkably, they did seem to respond to her melodic communications in ways they never did to regular speech.
If you're experiencing expanded awareness, spiritual visitations, or consciousness that seems to transcend ordinary boundaries, these may be valid spiritual developments rather than medical problems.
Your Daily Practice Options
Morning and evening rituals for grounding.
Morning Practice Options (choose one that calls to you):
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Sunrise Awareness: 5-minute sunrise watching without commentary or analysis—just receiving the light as it comes
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Bird Feeding Ritual: Feeding birds with attention to individual bird personalities and behaviors, letting them teach you about presence
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Tea Ceremony: Focus on warmth, aroma, taste, and the ritual of preparation as meditation in action
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Garden Touching: Feeling textures of plants, soil, water without naming or categorizing—just experiencing through touch
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Music Listening: Eyes closed, body swaying allowed, no performance expected—let music move through you
Evening Practice Options (choose one that nourishes you):
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Sunset Color Poetry: Describing sunset colors using poetic rather than accurate language—let beauty inspire your words
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Photo Memory Browsing: Looking through photos focusing on emotions and love, not factual recall
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Hand Massage Ceremony: Using scented lotion, no conversation required—caring touch as spiritual practice
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Poetry Listening: Emphasizing rhythm and sound over analytical meaning—let poetry wash over you
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Sensory Gratitude: Appreciating the day's experiences through touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound
Establishing Your Territory
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Map Your Meaningful Places: Identify locations within accessible distance that anchor your identity and bring peace
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Create Beauty Corners: Arrange objects, colors, textures in your living space that bring you joy and wonder
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Build Routine Routes: Establish paths that connect you with nature, community, or peaceful environments
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Develop Sensory Anchors: Use specific scents, sounds, textures, or tastes that ground you in your essential self
The Ongoing Spiral Path
Climbing in spirals, not straight lines
Your mountain path isn't linear—it spirals. You'll revisit similar territories at different elevations, each time with deeper understanding. Each spiral brings:
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Greater surrender to what is, less resistance to what's changing
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Increased trust in capacities that are emerging or remaining strong
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Decreased fear of areas requiring more support
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More wonder at possibilities you hadn't imagined
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Deeper relationships that transcend conventional communication
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Part 3: Recovery, Integration, and Summit Promise
The Reality of the Knife-Edge
At times, it feels lost altogether. Part 3 offers ways to recover your footing, practical tools to stay oriented, and the companionship needed to keep moving. Here, integration deepens — and the summit comes into view, not as cure, but as promise: identity preserved, relationships transformed, and a good completion of the climb.
When You've Lost the Path:
Recovery and Navigation Back
Finding your way after disorientation.
"The only way out is through."
—Robert Frost, from his poem "A Servant to Servants"
The path that goes through is not a wide highway. It can be narrow, sometimes knife-edged, requiring constant navigation and course correction. Even when Betty and I were walking through what felt like a garden of beauty and wonder, we were always aware that steep drop-offs into decline and despair lay not far on either side.
Sometimes you may find yourself too close to the edge, where the beauty diminishes and the precariousness becomes frightening. Sometimes you might lose the path entirely and need to find your way back. This isn't failure—it's the reality of navigating uncharted territory where consciousness meets cognitive change.
Signs You've Lost the Path
You know you've wandered off when:
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Beauty disappears from your daily experience
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All your energy goes to crisis management and damage control
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You feel like a collection of symptoms rather than a whole person
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You're fighting your journey instead of navigating it
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Your relationships become purely functional rather than meaningful
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Wonder, joy, and discovery vanish from your experience
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You feel trapped in decline narrative with no vision of what might emerge
Your Path Recovery Strategies
1. Release Control and Trust Your Own Wisdom
When others can't understand what you're experiencing or why certain approaches feel right to you, sometimes the path back requires you to trust your own navigation even when it defies others' logical assessment. You often have access to wisdom or understanding that those around you cannot yet see.
Betty would sometimes insist on taking unwise or extreme routes through the Rouge Valley or the Brickworks quarry, that made no sense to me, or want to stop and talk to flowers along the path. When I learned to let go of control—even when it challenged my assumptions—we often found our way back to beauty and meaning through her unconventional pathways.
2. Ask for a Big Adventure
When daily routines lose their magic and the path feels lost in mundane management, it may be time to request what Betty and I called "a big adventure." This means moving beyond everyday outings to experiences that re-inspire hope and wonder—something that elevates perspective and reminds you both why the journey is worthwhile.
A big adventure might be: returning to a place of deep meaning from your past, experiencing live music or art that moves you, visiting with people who see your full identity not just your diagnosis, or exploring nature in a way that feels like discovery rather than exercise.
3. Return to Your Three Dimensions
When lost, check which dimension you've abandoned:
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Psychosocial: Are others still relating to your whole self, or just managing symptoms?
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Environmental: Are you in places that support emergence, or environments that reinforce decline?
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Spiritual: Are your expanded experiences being honored, or pathologized as problems?
4. Seek Fresh Eyes
Sometimes path recovery requires someone outside your daily situation to help you see what you've lost sight of. This might be a friend who knew you before diagnosis, a spiritual advisor, or someone else who's navigated similar terrain successfully.
The Four Permissions: Your Navigation Tools
Guides for staying on course.
The path recovery strategies prepare you for the systematic navigation tools found in the Four Permissions framework. When you've lost the path, or when you're struggling to stay on the knife-edge through difficult terrain, the Four Permissions provide specific practices for:
Alexandria - Conscious farewell to capacities that are leaving while maintaining your vision of the summit that remains possible
Abilene - Refusing to follow others down dead-end paths, even when family, friends, or professionals insist these paths are "realistic" or "appropriate" for you
Ithaca - Navigation by meaningful waypoints and relationships rather than medical timelines or institutional maps
Opening Door - Recognition and support of new capacities, perspectives, and forms of consciousness that emerge at each stage of your journey
These aren't just philosophical concepts—they're practical tools for daily navigation when the path becomes unclear or when you find yourself lost in approaches focused only on decline.
The Accompaniment Spectrum:
From Recognition to Relationship
Support that evolves from acknowledgment to full companionship.
The path requires accompaniment, but accompaniment exists on a spectrum from recognition to full relationship. Many people feel isolated when support is actually surrounding them, waiting to be recognized.
Begin with Recognition Practice: Start by seeing support that may be invisible in our culture. When Betty and I began consciously practicing gratitude, we began to recognize all forms of support, what was invisible became visible and isolation transformed into connection:
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The morning birds singing light into the world ("They're singing just for us!" Betty would say)
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The river's constant presence offering its peaceful rhythm
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The neighbor's understanding nod when Betty repeated the same questions
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Trees providing shade and beauty without judgment
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Wonder appearing spontaneously as companionship
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Create a shelf dedicated to love
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Caregiver's who offer physical care from a spiritual place of love
Expand to Partial Accompaniment: Recognition practice reveals reciprocal relationships everywhere. The coffee shop staff who knew how Betty liked her sandwich made. The other regular park walkers who would stop to chat and tell us stories about each rescue dog. These created networks of partial accompaniment that reduced isolation significantly.
Build Toward Full Accompaniment: While recognition and partial accompaniment address immediate isolation, your complete journey benefits from someone willing to walk the entire path with you. This might be:
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Family members who see your journey as consciousness development
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Professional companions trained in complete framework navigation
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Community networks of others walking similar terrain
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Spiritual friends who honour transcendent dimensions
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Next-generation AI companions (like CARA AI) designed to support identity preservation
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Beauty becomes an active form of accompaniment
The AI Accompaniment Possibility: Emerging AI systems can provide 24/7 support for your identity maintenance, help preserve your communication abilities, and facilitate your relationships when human availability is limited. While not replacing human connection, AI companionship can bridge gaps and provide consistent navigation, identity and communications support throughout your journey.
Cultural Transformation Recognition: Full accompaniment for everyone requires societal change to recognize that accompaniment benefits both the person walking with and the person being accompanied.
This mutual benefit model, rather than burden-based caregiving, represents the cultural shift the Accompaniment Revolution seeks to create.
Summit Indicators
How to know you’re still on the path
Watch for these signs that your path goes through to the summit:
Weekly Markers:
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Moments of genuine joy appearing regularly despite challenges
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Your essential qualities remaining recognizable to those who know you best
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New interests, capacities, or expressions emerging unexpectedly in you
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Your relationships deepening rather than becoming purely functional
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Spiritual or transcendent experiences being honored rather than pathologized
Monthly Patterns:
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Environmental modifications creating noticeable positive changes
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Support systems responding to your changing needs without crisis
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Family members discovering new aspects of you they hadn't seen before
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Medical professionals commenting on unexpected preservation of personhood
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Community connections maintaining or strengthening despite changes
Ongoing Evolution:
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Your journey feeling like conscious navigation rather than helpless decline
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Accompaniment partnerships developing mutual growth and discovery
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Practical care tasks integrated with meaning and relationship
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End-of-life conversations happening with hope rather than only fear
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Legacy and identity questions being explored actively
Red Flags - When You May Have Lost the Path:
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All conversations focused on deficits, decline, or management
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You spending most time in institutional or medical environments
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You are in a fear of financial limitations
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Your spiritual experiences consistently medicated or redirected
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Family relationships becoming primarily caregiver-patient dynamics
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No moments of joy, discovery, or growth occurring
The Summit Promise
Arriving with identity intact, love deepened, and gratitude intact.
The summit isn't cure. It isn't reversal. It isn't even survival in the conventional sense. It's healing beyond a cure
The summit is arriving at life's natural completion with:
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Your essential self intact and recognized by those who matter most
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Relationships that transcended every cognitive limitation through love and presence
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Discoveries about consciousness, beauty, and connection you couldn't have imagined
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Spiritual opening and mutual growth that blessed everyone in your circle
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The knowledge that your awareness is so much more than analytical thinking
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A good death, whenever it comes, with dignity and identity preserved through relationship
Betty reached her summit after seven years of climbing. In her final days, she was completely herself—not who she'd been at the mountain's base, but who she'd become through both intuitive and conscious navigation of the journey. More essence than personality, more love than individual memory, more presence than past or future. It was as though she was full awakened, her journey continued to her last breath.
Her evening reflections during our quiet times showed this evolution: moving from "Who am I?" through playful exploration ("I'm a bloody nuisance!" "No, you're bloody marvelous!") to deep knowing that transcended questions. Her last message was one of bravery and pure love that reached beyond words.
"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."
—Viktor Frankl, neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor
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Your Journey Begins Now
Every step you’ve taken leads here.
The path is open before you.
This is not the end of the climb, but the beginning of your own journey.
The path that goes through is now yours to walk — step by step, camp by camp.
You are not alone. Others have walked it, and companions wait to join you along the way.
Walking the Hero Path
"Not all those who wander are lost."
—J.R.R. Tolkien, from "The Fellowship of the Ring"
Whether you're facing your own diagnosis, in the middle of your journey, or simply recognizing that cognitive change is part of your probable future, the choice is before you:
Will you choose a path that dead-ends at technique and management? Or will you choose the path that goes all the way through—through apparent loss to unexpected discovery, through cognitive decline to consciousness expansion, through what seems like ending to what is actually transformation?
The mountain stands before you. Others have found the path that goes through. We can show you the waypoints, the places to rest, the vistas that make the climb worthwhile, the summit that awaits.
But only you can take the first step.
The path that honours all of who you are—relational being, spatial navigator, spiritual consciousness—is waiting.
The path that goes through is real.
The summit is possible.
Your journey of discovery awaits.
Remember:
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You don't have to see the whole path to begin
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You just need to know that a complete path exists
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Others have walked it successfully
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You won't be walking alone
When you refuse to accept that cognitive decline is the only story, you join a revolution of people worldwide who are discovering that wonder, meaning, and love can deepen through every change.
The mountain is calling. The path goes through. Your journey of discovery awaits.
Next Steps:
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Take a look at the full OTHER Day One Kit
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For proof this path exists visit the Accompaniment Series
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Explore using the Visual Navigation Map
The Hero Path
We have not even to risk the adventure alone
for the heroes of all time have gone before us.
The labyrinth is thoroughly known ...
we have only to follow the thread of the hero path.
And where we had thought to find an abomination
we shall find a God.
And where we had thought to slay another
we shall slay ourselves.
Where we had thought to travel outwards
we shall come to the center of our own existence.
And where we had thought to be alone
we shall be with all the world.
― Joseph Campbell
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