The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 48 of 254
Dementia as peeling the onion to its core
This is closer to the view taken by Janet and her daughter Jackie, who run the care home where Linda is now a resident. Janet utterly rejects the common view that dementia is the slow death of the self. ‘I have a belief that dementia actually makes you more like yourself, so rather than rob you of your self, it robs you of all the exterior things that you pile on through life, all the baggage that you carry and the layers. What you’re left with at the end of the day with dementia is the core person, the soul, or whatever term you want to put on it. We’ve described it as an onion. If you peel an onion, from the brown skin outwards, you’ve got lots and lots of layers. When you get right to the centre of the onion you get to a little pearl in the middle and you can’t peel any more off it. It seems to me that it’s the real essence of the person.’