Living with dementia

I have just completed an online dementia course – “Living with Dementia: Impact on Individuals, Caregivers, Communities and Societies” – which gave me a very understanding of dementia and dementia care from US perspective, but also globally. I strongly recommend it to anyone who wishes to work with the elderly, but also who wants to understand how our minds work. After years of studying child development (within the communication, foreign languages, teaching methodology) I am now looking at the other side of our lives. I am really fortunate that I can apply my new learnings to work at one of our local care homes too and support few wonderful people with fun activities. It’s a very rewarding job and I wish I had time for more than few hours a week, but I need to focus on my studies. Working with the elderly I think about death a lot. I start to realise just how much gravity is in those years when we look back at our lives but also start to live more in the moment, counting our blessings. Is there a way to understand life this way much earlier in life? I think Buddhist religion and philosophy is really close to that. Japanese zen philosophy even more. But I wonder how the best elements of that thinking could be applied to people of all ages. I guess I will learn that in my studies at some point. I do want to study our approach to death in more detail. I know someone who did a listening course at Oxford Cruse and I am tempted to give it a go in autumn to dive into this topic a bit more. I suspect a lot of mental health issues or just problems in life might arise from our fear of death, I’d like to know just how much this assumption of mine is true.