James Mattson

Between 1986 and 1992, my family and I lived on Long Island, about 50 miles east of Manhattan’s Times Square. One of the highlights of those years was attending “Big River,” the Broadway musical version of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The show ran for 1,005 performances, of which we attended two. It earned a Tony award for best musical, brought Ron Richardson a Tony for his portrayal of Jim, a runaway slave in pre-Civil War Missouri, and garnered a Tony nomination for Daniel H. Jenkins for his performance as Jim’s vagabond friend, Huckleberry Finn.

One of my favorite songs in the musical was “Worlds apart,” a duet by Richardson and Jenkins in which Jim and Huck contemplate friendship in a world they see the same but view differently. I was reminded of the song’s lyrics recently while preparing to post a gerontology-related article by Claudia K.Y. Lai, RN, PhD. The lyrics influenced my choice of the article’s title, “If we could see through their eyes.”

My mother and mother-in-law both suffered from dementia before leaving us. As I watched the process unfold—differently for each but also similarly—I often wondered what they were seeing and thinking. At the same time, I sought to avoid, as much as possible, treating them differently from the people we knew and loved before they began their protracted exits.

In addressing her own efforts to relate to patients with dementia, Lai writes: “I tried to visualize myself as a dementia patient, with all of these experiments performed on me. And I knew that, if I were suffering from dementia, I would want researchers and clinicians, first and foremost, to appreciate the kind of person I am and plan my care accordingly.” If any of us had dementia, it’s the kind of care we would want.

To communicate her conclusions about caring for patients with dementia to attendees of a regional conference on Alzheimer’s disease in Taiwan, Lai resorted to the unusual approach of writing her scientific abstract in poetic form. That abstract, titled “Nursing perspectives in the care of people with dementia: A personal view,” is published as a sidebar to her article. I know you’ll appreciate her thought-provoking perspectives. RNL