Dementia: Considerations of What Makes a Meaningful Life

Kate de Medeiros explores what it entails to have a meaningful life for people living with advanced dementia. Since dementia is typically characterized as a phase of meaninglessness, in the dementia literature, the focus is on quality of life rather than meaning in life. De Medeiros starts by considering old age as a cultural and social construct and giving a brief overview of dementia. After presenting two frameworks of meaning—Baumeister’s four-component model and Derkx’s seven dimensions framework—she describes two illustrative case examples from ethnographic fieldwork in the US involving people living with dementia to consider the possibilities and limitations in meaning in life. The cases make it clear that people living with dementia have different subjectivities than those for whom both meaning frameworks were originally developed and, therefore, risk reducing meaning to cognitive ability. De Medeiros pleads for expanding meaning to include people living with dementia in both frameworks. Rather than looking at people living with dementia as having lost the opportunity to find meaning in life, future work should consider meaning sources for people living with dementia.