Between Worlds: The Seven Spiritual Lessons of Dementia

More than 55 million people around the world are living with dementia. Those who love them — who sit with them through the long silences, the repeated questions, the moments when a familiar face goes unrecognized — are often compelled by peers and health professionals to view this process as one of slow and irrevocable loss. Theresa Cheung sees it as much more.

In Between Worlds, she draws on her experience caring for her husband of thirty years, who is living with Alzheimer’s disease; her decades of research into spirituality, dreams, the afterlife, and the science of consciousness; and a tradition of spiritual thought that has long viewed death as a process rather than an event. She builds a radical and reorienting case against viewing dementia as loss, revealing it to be less an unraveling than a gradual transition, the soul detaching itself from the Earthly plane before the body gives way.

Cheung’s approach does something most caregiving books do not: It reframes the experience of watching a loved one fade and offers something other than grief. The person who no longer remembers your name is living entirely in the present moment without grudges or plans or pretense. And they have something invaluable to show us about how to be human.