Death comes in the end

Having dementia can be described as a continuous loss, as fighting a losing battle and as saying goodbye agonizingly slowly, saying goodbye to life as it used to be with everything it meant and finally saying goodbye to life itself. Death comes in the end. In this chapter, the terms ‘the threatened self’, ‘the lost self’, ‘the submerged self’ and the ‘withdrawn self’ are used to describe the dementia process (Verdult, 1998). They are equivalents to Behavioural Stages 1–4 in Jones (2004).