Spirituality and Dementia

The experience of dementia poses some unique challenges to our assumptions about spirituality and its role in human life. Dementia strikes at human capacities such as memory, communication, self-awareness and agency which we count as central to our consciousness and spirituality. For some, this even means that a person with dementia has no access to spirituality, and cannot be counted as a ‘person’ at all.

The starting-point for this chapter is a conviction that a person with dementia is, indeed, still a person until the end of their life. This means that we have to think about spirituality in a different way: not as something that we ‘have’ or ‘do’ as individuals, through our personal intelligence, intuition and agency; but as something embedded in our history and our social network, the product of our past decisions and shared with the others who are close to us. In this way, people with dementia point us towards a richer understanding of spirituality that encompasses the whole of our life.