Vignettes of Yvette at VI by John G. Gurley

During the past year, I would say that Yvette has held her own mentally, but physically she has gone downhill.' Even swallowing food properly requires clear commands from the brain. Then her brain shut down instructions on how to hold and handle utensils while eating. Yvette's brain was no longer giving her adequate instructions on how to walk. `Dementia is not entirely mental deterioration. He tenderly describes her decline and her continual plea to take her home with him, but he also takes the time to discuss the disease of dementia. What follows is a series of memories of John's daily walks with Yvette in the garden of the Memory Support unit where she was confined. I collapsed - yes, a 92-year-old weakling collapsed, but a weakling still head over heels in love.' But, when they led her out of the door of our apartment, and Yvette turned her head to look back at me, with a puzzled and then a frightened look, I told her that everything would be fine, blew her a kiss, closed the door - and then I cried my heart out. I knew that the two nurses were coming, of course, for I had arranged it. For the past four or five years, Yvette had been steadily slipping away from me, on her own, as she was being drawn into the tentacles of dementia.

He opens his book with the following: `Two weeks after our 67th wedding anniversary, on a morning in early April, 2012, two nurses came to our apartment and took my wife, Yvette, away. It is also an introduction to some and a memory tag for others of the descent into dementia and few authors have been able to relate the emotional aspects of this state as tenderly and yet realistically as John Gurley.

John's VIGNETTES OF YVETTE AT VI is the first book in a set of four - a love story of a man for his wife. John is now 94 years old and he and Yvette moved to a retirement home near Stanford University where John is in independent living and Yvette lived in a memory support unit - a major unit called Vi at Palo Alto - on the corner of the campus of Stanford University. He has taught economics at both Princeton University and Stanford University and researched economics at Brookings Institution in Washington, DC with is wife Yvette - a lead in for the writing of this book. I love those smiles, but I don't count them as definitive'Ĭalifornia author John Gurley has an impressive career.

Vignettes of Yvette at VI by John G. Gurley