When someone you love is diagnosed with dementia, there are no good choices, only the least terrible ones. In this profoundly moving Monktoberfest talk, Chris and JT share their personal stories of caring for a partner and a parent through the long, heartbreaking progression of the disease. With honesty, dark humor, and compassion, they open up about the realities most people don’t talk about: guilt, exhaustion, family conflict, financial strain, and the impossible balance between love and self-preservation. This talk offers hard-won lessons on finding community, setting boundaries, navigating the U.S. healthcare system, and remembering that the tragedy is the disease, not the ending.
Transcript
Chris: So I guess I want to start this by saying thank you to Steve, to everybody here for creating an environment where it feels safe to have this conversation. I don’t think either of us can imagine giving a talk like this anywhere else, of having the psychological safety and understanding that people will be compassionate to everything that’s been going on. So as Steve said, we’re going to talk about dementia.
It also runs on both sides of my family. My those statistics don’t look good, so thank you.
JT: Maybe it’s not obvious, about you content warning. This is going to be a pretty frank discussion. I will use humor, maybe even slightly inappropriate as it’s my coping mechanism to get through this, but please, please, please if this makes you at all any uncomfortable, feel free to step out now, or even in the middle of the talk. I will jump in with one other thing, too, I know my lovely 13-year-old Jay I know you always find my talks at home, you may want to skip this one.
>> As always we’re not psychologists, been promoted out of being technical into being management. This just a painful experience all around. This is a story of not having any good choices, of only trying to make the least terrible decisions you possibly can. Some of these things are going to be very US-centric. We’re going to talk about Medicaid. Other places are different. Maybe better, maybe worse, and every relationship is unique, right? Your relationship with your friends, your family, the sufferer. I wish I could say that there’s a common pattern, but these are just two paths for very unpleasant experience.
So somebody you know, somebody you care about has been diagnosed with dementia. Let’s talk about who this is.
>> JT: It was my mother. She started off being a nun, got all the way up to her final vows and decided that she wanted to be actually more progressive than that, so she dropped out and ended up leading a life of leadership ahead. You know, my mother has a senior leader, CEO in the ’80s was not something that was super-common for a mom. I will have to say, also the time she dropped out, she was starting to date this other Navy sailor, so if you ever gave my dad a rum and coke, he had a very different reason for why she dropped out. But hey, that’s the way it is. Unfortunately in hindsight about 2010, she started showing symptoms, officially diagnosed in 2013.
>> So Roger was my partner. Roger was fluent in three languages, guided massive German banks through the Euro transition. Took his organic chemistry test in German. I failed my twice in English, so I want to put that out there, just because we’re going to talk about what this looks like as it progresses.
So let’s talk about how it shows up.
>> JT: Yeah, dementia is a big, big broad category. Think cancer, right there’s a gazillion different types. Alzheimer’s which I think has the biggest name, memory and executive functions, what do we mean by executive functions? That showed up with my mother would go into the store and have a panic because she couldn’t find her keys and she’d walked out and she’d left the car running, right? Very basic things like that. Come to find out, she shopped off the same exact shopping list for about 12 months and we didn’t realize. Friends, I don’t care how much you love pickles, you cannot get through that many pickles. But there’s lots of other types: Lewy body, Parkinson’s dementia, and some of this stuff combines.
>> Chris: So in Roger’s case we’re talking about early onset. Looking back, we can probably trace it to about 50 years old. I’m 53, that’s kind of terrifying. And as JT said, this is the worst lottery ever, you don’t usually get one form of dementia, you get multiple forms. Lewy body is one of the forms Roger had. It involves especially later stages, hallucinations, all sorts of muscular and visual degradation. Last couple of years, Roger couldn’t sit in a chair without help. Like he’d just miss completely, right? That’s hard to watch people go through, so I’m going to do this one, because I have strong opinions here, because I dealt with his family on this one.
What about medicine? So we have no clue what causes dementia in any of its multitude of forms. At best we have some correlation. If anyone’s been paying attention, there has been a lot of issues around potentially falsified research that sidetracked most of the research going on for about a decade in a branch that had no relevance, so there’s a special place in hell for somebody like that.
There are some pharmaceutical options. They are of marginal and very dubious value. At best, they may slow the progression slightly, often at the expense of some very, very ugly side effects.
Consider them very carefully and like I said, read anything you hear in the media that loves to say, oh, we’re just about to have a cure. We have been just about to have a cure for 25 years, we are no closer now than we were 25 years ago.
So I wish there was an option. I can’t tell you the number of times I got text messages from Roger’s mom about, oh, I just read this article and it looks like — like, first off, that might have been effective five, six years ago, we are well past that.
>> JT: I will say as my mom progressed and was taking the drugs — we’ll talk about it later, you get to have a lot of uncomfortable and hard conversations, but one of hers was one of regret for taking the medications and slowing what was coming and in her mind just making it longer that she had to live with it. That’s a really fucking hard conversation to have, I have to say, but yeah, there’s no good choices.
>> Chris: So this is gonna suck. A lot, right? There’s no sugar-coating it, there’s no positives. There’s no upside. There’s no getting better, right? The number of times I would have friends, coworkers, even staff at the facility would be like, oh, well, I remember having conversation with the facility director, maybe four months before Roger passed and Adam said, trying to be very kind, well, you know, sometimes people stay around longer. And I’m like, that is not a kindness, right? That is not what anyone wants now, right? And we’re going to try and be as honest as we can about that. I can’t imagine anything in my 53 years that sucks even close to this. That includes, HIV, parents, everything. So focus on quality. not quantity.
Sometimes we think about 100 years is a success. The question is, what was that 100 years?
>> JT: The most important thing you can do is focus on you. And if you’re in a situation where you have kids, your kids.
We’ll talk about boundaries and how important that is and unfortunately we’ll even get later in this talk where we have to talk about money and how do you protect yourself — hate to say family, because damn it, it’s my mother, but your immediate household in that situation, as well.
three things in this country we really, really — I should say maybe in this life, I shouldn’t tie it to the US, that we don’t like to talk about: Mental health, aging, death, and this is that lovely parlay that a covers them all.
>> Chris: So let’s start. You don’t have to do this alone. You should not even attempt to do this alone. And yet, it will feel very lonely.
Right? You have to create a village of support for yourself. That means being open about things that we don’t like to talk about. Anyone who follows me on social media has witnessed the last couple of years of decline. I’ve tried to be very open. I’ve tried to put content warnings on everything.
That was part of my therapy is just being able to be verbally open about what was going on.
I’ve had great family, great friends, JT, ironically JT knew Roger before I did. They actually worked together many, many years ago. This is very strange. But no matter how many people you have in your life, you will feel alone. You will feel like you are the only person carrying this burden. I don’t know how you get out of that. I wish I had an answer.
Hopefully your friends stay with you and remind you, but self-care is everything.
And I really, really mean this. And so many of us struggle with taking care of ourselves. It’s very easy to take care of others, right? But as someone reminded me once, you can’t help anybody else if you don’t help yourself. JT: Help!
>> Chris: And oh, boy, is the urge to fix strong. Right? Early on, you go through these situations where somebody misremembers something, you want to correct them, you want to help them? Right you’re staying so hard to help them stay in this world, and early on it’s a little frustrating, but it’s OK, right? But there’s this point where it actually is dangerous. It’s counterproductive. You have to learn to just go with the flow. You have to learn that sure, your mom was just here yesterday. She hasn’t been here for three months, right? She’ll be back tomorrow. She won’t be back for another two months, right? Trying to correct people — one of the things that became very obvious for Roger, especially and I think this is true for most Alzheimer’s patients is frustration sends whatever residual executive function, emotional regulation is left, just wipes it out instantly, right?
>> JT: Just amplifies the moment in a negative way for them. It’s a marathon. Like I said in hindsight we started out with a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment which is this really soft and squishy in 2013, mom’s probably close to the end and we can talk about hospice and those things in a minute. But yeah, it’s something you have to be in for a really, really long time.
>> Chris: I want to talk about the difference between early onset. Like, early onset is almost its own thing, right? Does what it says on the tin, but it’s also a wild and very whiplash ride of three to five years, right? Roger was given five years. He made it six and a little bit. But the other thing is, you can’t do everything. You will want to do everything. You will feel like you should have done more, and yet, in every case, you have done more than you probably should have. Right? But you still feel guilty. So invest in Kleenex — I don’t remember who owns Kleenex anymore, some massive conglomerate. You’re going to cry a lot. The thing that I think separates dementia from a lot of, if not every other disease, is that you don’t lose somebody once. You lose them over and over and over again. The person they were last week is not the person they are this week. You’ve just lost another part of them, right? It’s stretched out over years, right? They’re taken away bit by bit, piece by piece.
I’ve discovered that like around Roger, I couldn’t show any emotion or he would just completely go off the deep end so I learned to just like suppress everything when I was around him and then I would go sit in my car and cry for 20 minutes before I left the facility, but like I said, social media was an outlet, my sister was an enormous outlet, JT, others, but you have to find those outlets. You cannot do this and be fully self-contained, no matter — but my sister and I have been called hyperresilient. I’ve cried it as being the best credit rating you’ve ever had and for a while, my bank was like, no, we’re not doing this anymore. So I know you —
>> JT: It happened by accident after visiting my mom, and my routine is when I leave mom, I text her sister, she’s one of a family of 11 and several of them are still alive. Frankly that’s just my way of coping with the community thing, but I couldn’t unlock my phone for whatever reason so I used to start yelling at my phone and I realized that I felt pretty good so now I can only imagine mom is in a group home which is just a home in a residential group home. I still wonder what people that are walking their dog and this guy is sitting in his pickup truck yelling at his phone. I think Chris and my text stream could be a book someday, not really. But I think somebody who won the sad lottery of on the journey at the same time. To that point, lean on friends. Find fellow travelers. There are many people in this room that have texted me or Slacked me, or WhatsApp or whatever, and said, hey, just checking in. That’s what you need. That’s what this community — Chris talked about it. Come to find out, we have a lot of people in common, but Chris and I never met each other until here, right? There was a number of years where Chris and I were sharing this, we live 30 miles apart, 40 miles apart and would see each other once a year, right here, because of life happens. You have to find those people. Find fellow travelers, and then I’m going to say find those that are not willing to travel with you or be aware of boundaries, right? Oh, that can’t be that bad. Boy, there’s nothing that will sugar a reaction than somebody that will judge somebody else’s journey on this. Hopefully for some people it’s not that bad. That would be fucking wonderful. But also realizing that Chris and Roger were in a different position than mom and I were, right?
That kind of thing.
>> There’s nobody here from Virginia-Mason, the hospital system I was working with, but I want to say one positive thing in this very dark time in our country: Roger and I were treated amazingly well by the hospital, by his neurologist, by the Jewish facility that he ended up moving into. They were amazing, they treated us as equals, there was never a question, in fact, we had been going to see a neurologist for five years before we had this conversation, of like, oh, we don’t have a power of attorney on file, because we’d never thought about thinking those things.
>> The Alzheimer’s Association is one. I will say. There is a whole network of support groups and a support group that will meet you where you are. Some support groups are what I would call the stereotypical, hi, I’m JT, I’ve been dealing with Alzheimer’s since X. Some have just information-sharing groups, and they also seem to be brutally honest about where that study, right? When you do get that family member that says, I just saw that new study that they think they solved it, a lot of times you can go to the Alzheimer’s Association and say, hey, that’s an interesting study, but tap the brakes and there’s a lot of snake oil salesmen out there that say ooh, if you just take fish oil —
>> JT: Guilt is inescapable. You are helping this person navigate that cannot anymore, and absolutely the land of less bad choices, not good choices. You are going to have to do things that are hard, but in hindsight, taking the keys away, right, from the car.
You have to be the one to decide when to take some of the independence, and you have to decide when, and there’s no map. There’s no directions. There’s no — at best it’s this is what you can look for, right?
The one that still bugs me to this day was my mom’s dog. It was starting to become obvious that she couldn’t take care of this dog the way you would want to have it take care of but Mom would look at me and say, this is the last thing I have. This is the last choice, the last thing — the rest of my day, somebody comes to tell me when to take this pill, when to take a shower, this is the last thing I have. So we did rehome the dog. Did we wait too late? Yeah. Mom couldn’t remember we had rehomed the dog and so we would wake up every morning and I would get a phone call at 6 or 6:30 in the morning because Mom had lost her dog, she didn’t know where he was. There are no good options.
>> Chris … I’ll talk about that, when Roger moved, I questioned, did we do it too early? Do we have waited another couple of months and there was a lovely woman in the facility and every day her entire day was where am I? Who am I? Who are my kids? Why am I here? Do I need to pay for dinner? Like, how do I pay for that? Where’s my room? Every day. She’d been there for three years, she probably has another five to six years. That’s it. A life of terror and fear. You don’t want that. And you’re always going to be more optimistic than you really should be. Things are further along than you think. I’ll just give you an example. After Roger was diagnosed, suddenly a lot of things popped into focus, things that had happened in the past that just seemed odd. Well, that was weird. He’s usually so organized. Why did all of that fall apart and now all of a sudden it was like, oh, you don’t think somebody at 50 years old is going to be diagnosis with dementia. It’s not one of the choices on the multi-choice test.
So I will say, family can help. My family was amazing. They can also be another burden. His family was not the most helpful all the time. I’ll be very honest. Hopefully she never watched this. His mom lived in denial until probably the last two or three months.
I said more than a few times, reality doesn’t care whether you believe in it or not, but not everyone’s gonna get it, right?
And self-defense, self-protection makes people do wild and crazy things, right? So you have to set your boundaries, right? And you have to protect them and hold them fiercely, because no one else is going to do that for you.
JT: Will change, not only if you’re going through a 10 or 15-year journey, we change, right, we learn new things, we hopefully mature. Sometimes their personalities will change dramatically, right? Care facilities where there’s multiple rooms and multiple people, I have to take one tangent I for got. One piece of introducing my mother, she spent the last half of her career, ironically starting memory care facilities and trying to make them — well, she started three different hospice units largely focused on mental care. I bring that up, because of what is going to be a very, very uncomfortable thing I’m going to tell you here is they also forget they’re married or they were married and when you have multiple people in a care facility that don’t necessarily remember they’re married or vows to others, they still have other human urges. I can remember my mother more than once, at least in my states that I know of — well, let me take that back, in Florida and Washington State, the care facility is required to expose to the family when this happens. Sex — I don’t know why I’m shying away from it.
>> We’re all adults here.
>> Congratulations, Mom? I hope it was a good time? But I also know what it was like to be on the other end upping with a my mom have to make that phone call, if it’s your partner, if I’m going to — I wish I could remove the sting of what that is. Right? And hopefully they don’t remember later, because that was a little bit of Mom, too. She’d remember Dad after and was caught in this little bit of a guilt cycle.
>> I remember maybe nine months before Roger asked, we were at a neurology appointment and the neurologist asked him, what’s his name? So they may forget who you are. They probably will not forget what you represent, right? You represent safety. Right?
>> JT: I know we’re getting on time and we haven’t gotten to the financial piece. One other thing is they remember who you are, and remember pieces about who you are. Twoish months ago, sitting with my mom and she decided to tell me all about her son, and it was kinda cool, because hey, she kinda thought.
>> Sounds like a nice guy.
>> Except for she could still apparently remember that I ruined the Christmas of 1993 by going to bootcamp on December 21st, but couldn’t remember my name. So there we go. This is real and back to my mom having done this for a while gave me and my family the — my kids, the greatest gift in that she knew we had to say goodbye. Yeah, Mike, if you had the betting pool, slide whenever when I lost my shit. So we have had the ability to do that multiple times. Unfortunately not now, but it did allow me to handle a big piece of the grief process early. Obviously I’m going to be devastated when my mother actually dies, but I’ve done some of the work that comes along with that already.
>> This is something I struggled with. Talk about being hyperresilient. Don’t lose yourself in this. This is a marathon. You have to find joy in the world. Whatever it is, that slice of cake, a cocktail, friends, an indulgent — like, I love to watch the movie Clue. I know every single line, I’ve watched it 300 times. I realize it’s a silly film, but it brings me joy, I’ve probably watched it half a dozen times a month just as a way to escape. So let’s talk about the messy details, the stuff that we don’t want to talk about. That’s the emotions. That’s the internal pain. But the messiest thing: Money. This is going to cost an insane amount of money. You’ve got three options in the US. You can self-fund care if you’ve got the resources. Medicaid will pay. We’ll talk about that. And finally there’s private long-term care insurance. A lot of it has a lot of restrictions on it. Mostly you have to sign up for it very early. Like, in your 30s, for it to actually still be good at that point. And we’ll talk a little bit about how much that is.
>> This catches some people by surprise and I’m sorry if this does. Those of you that know my employment background can imagine how infuriating this is to me. But if you get a heart attack and you go into a facility, a hospital, and you need a nurse to keep an eye on you to keep you safe, to give you pills at a certain amount of time, we got that. Maybe not at the level we wish it was covered at. If you have a hip replacement and you go through there, oh, but you can’t go home because you’re not safe yet, we’ll help pay for a facility to keep you safe, to get your pills on time. If you get dementia, haha, fuck you, right? They’ll cover the medicine, they’ll cover the neurologist, but the place to keep you safe, the place to give you the pills, nope, sorry.
>> Chris: So what does that cost? So we started with just some in-home assistance, right? Four hours a day, three days a week. That was about $3500 a month. Memory care facility, depends on where you live, Seattle is not the cheapest place, but it’s also not the most expensive, 7 to 12 thousand a month for room and board, Roger was a little over 11,000 at the start. It gets you a lot. Again, food, meals, bathing, all of that stuff. What it doesn’t get you is a lot of one-on-one time.
We were very lucky, Roger is — well, his friends call him the frugal cloud, right? When we first met he had this amazing cashmere hoodie that probably cost a fortune at some point, but it was five sizes too big, it had little moth holes all over it and he was like, it’s still warm, I’m not giving it up. So we got to the point and we had the resources. We could make these choices, right? But that doesn’t mean everybody can.
>> JT: Yeah, despite mom’s professional and good job of 401(k)s and all of that stuff, she was only able to private pay for about 6 years from that aspects. Medicaid is the vehicle in the United States that has kind of drew the short straw to kind of cover long-term care. OK, that varies very much state by state. That is also rapidly changing with legislation that has passed recently.
>> Chris: And not for the better.
>> JT: And not for the better. It’s not a failure. Also, know you must for most facilities have to private pay for one to two years before you get to Medicaid, so it’s really a pain in the ass to have this diagnosis know it is coming or at least the big outlines and the first thing you can’t do is give somebody a hug, you have to say, what’s your money look like? Because that’s a part of it. Medicaid has many, many rules. I’ve gotten to know from my old job but also my journey with my mother is that 95 percent of the people working for the state are good humans who want to help you but it is financially driven, not care-given. You have to think very early about your parents’ assets or Roger’s assets, things like that.
They can’t just give away the money, right? Medicaid has a — not only do you have to be in this really cruel state of incredibly poor before you can apply for it, they also have going to go back with a fine-tooth comb and you’re going to have to collect all of these statements over the past three years and if mom gave a grandkid $3,000 for a college fund, they’re going to want that back, OK? I think a lot of us in the US, all to various degrees go into the taxes and think, maybe I can write this off, right? We all have our quirks — it is incredibly black and white and zero gray and those social workers and stuff that make she is decisions, have zero latitude, even if they want to, and yes, that might mean suddenly you have to take care of your parents, because nobody else can.
It’s been a good system. One last thing — I know we’re totally blowing up the time and the schedule here. One incredibly shitty thing about care facilities is that they don’t like taking Medicaid, because frankly they don’t get paid enough for what they do, let me start with that. They can sign a contract with you that says, yes, if you pay private pay full bore ahead of time, we’ll agree to take the Medicaid. Most of them are good natured. Not all of them. If they have to call an ambulance for a parent or anything and once they leave that care facility, they can go, hey, we’re not equipped to take them back. Now you don’t have any way to private pay to get somebody else to take Medicaid, welcome to the trap. I am lucky that we have not gone through there, but I’m lucky I knew that was a thing and I could actually get other language in the contract to try to cover some of that. Somewhere in there you get to give them a hug, I promise, but you have to deal with all this other bullshit first.
>> I will say Medicaid, in spite of Roger’s substantial assets, why we didn’t get married. We’d been talking about getting married about three months before he was diagnosis, done. Because I had to drain every penny I had, as well, so I saw we had to keep going. So let’s talk about legal. Do it now, you can’t do it later, right? You do not want to go through the process of trying to get your mom declared legally incompetent so you can actually do a power of attorney without them.
Get a lawyer. It will cost you $5,000. Hopefully everybody here can afford that. I no know that’s a lot of money. But you’ll need to make difficult decisions around medical care, around end of life care. Make sure the will is up to date. Make sure it says what they want. Right? And I’ll just — minor financial tip, everything you can deal with as a designated beneficiary, you should, 401(k)s, IRSs, pensions if they can be assigned for that, none of that goes through probate, right? And the last thing, because this was first thing out of Roger’s mouth: Death with dignity, right? JT and I are lucky, we live on the West Coast, California, Oregon and Washington State have have a death with dignity system, physician assisted suicide, sometimes called. That is designed for people who have degenerative physical diseases. You must still be competent at the time legally to make the decision. I get it. I wish there was a navigable way through this. I don’t think this is. So this is a tech conference. Let’s talk about tech, right?
>> I have to say — I’m going to steal your thunder, that music box you built for him was the coolest fucking thing. Go ahead.
>> Leverage technology broadly for yourself and them. I think technology helped us extend Roger’s perception of independence, right? So all of his friends, his mom, there was just a big square he could tap on his iPad and it would call them. You get FaceTime, amazing technology, right?
We used the brand is Skylight, it’s a photo frame. Friends and family would get photos all the time. Pictures of his niece’s cats and things like that. This is a little music box I built. Roger loved music. I was sort of annoyed by the fact that he was actually at the Queen Wembley concert. Music was a big deal, right?
But he couldn’t operate iTunes, right? So I took all of his favorite music, put it in a box, two big buttons start and stop, right? It was an amazing thing. And I know you had your mom with a phone that could help —
>> Yeah, Raz memory phone. I try not to make product plugs, but this was really good. It was Android wrapper that was targeted to this world. It only gave them so many buttons. I will tell you there was moments where you wish that person didn’t have your number, but I do long for the days when she still could. One perk, they are legally required to give access to 911. The phone providers and skins and all that current take that away. And you’ve heard about current — you will get to know your fire station and police station. And they can call you — where they will call you and go so, no, OK, appreciate you, love you Officer Daniels, off you go.
>> So memory care facility. I know we’re wildly over time. Start discussing it early, find out what matters, research it early. Almost every one will have a wait list. Some of the wait lists will be years. That’s hard to think about, right? When you move them, create a familiar environment. Roger collected art everywhere he was, it literally was a museum gallery, five paintings high, everything covered, but also not just art, but music, fabrics, photographs, furniture, familiar items, right? This is a traumatic experience for somebody to move. Give them things that they can feel comfortable with.
But create a safe environment, right? Think ADA, right even if they’re still fully mobile, think ADA. This was the hardest thing for me, but a friend of mine who specializes in this kind of care told me, he’s like, after they move, you need to not see them for a couple of weeks. You need to give them time to establish, right, to grow into that environment, and it will kill you, because you want to know, and I would call every day and check, but I would call the facility and talk to the nurses, and about three weeks later, I finally broke down, but there are a lot of activities. Some of them were kind of silly, but they’re all very well tuned to the kind of cognitive skills of the residents. Go and participate, right if you’ve got flexibility go to one of the craft-making things or whatever. I don’t dance, Roger loved to dance. The rabbi at the facility has guilted me so many times into dancing many —
>> We’ve gone on this journey five or six years ago and I’ve still yet to get a video of you dancing.
>> I have videos, just not in my home.
>> Hospice, I’m incredibly biased because my mother helped start several of the units, especially in the South. It is the first time the health care system works for you and your family. If you are in the hospice system, you are have said I want to shift to comfort care. Not life-lengthening, not health. This is a big emotional system, as much as I’m a huge fan of hospice, yes, I’ve known since 2013, but nine months ago when we decided to actually make this pivot, that it was time, shittily, you have to qualify for hospice, you have to be so close to an end before you can do this, but the system works not only for my mother — whether it’s they helped navigate last rites and that kind of sacramental stuff for my mother at the local church. Hospice is as much for you as it is for the person who’s undergoing the disease, hospice is not a dementia-only thing. If you get in an unfortunate situation whether you for somebody else, whether it’s one of the degenerative deadly diseases, they can help a lot, and I would tell you to lean on them. The weight that came off my shoulders when we started using them was amazing.
>> Chris: Yeah, I’ll say to put it into perspective, Roger went into hospice on a Monday. We talked for two and a half hours, when was the last time anybody talked to their doctor for two and a half hours? And it was all about what would Roger want, right? That’s something that is almost impossible to see, so this is something JT said, right? Your role is to land the plane as gracefully as possible. This requires a lot of conviction, especially at the very end. But I will just tell you, having gone through this with my mom, with Roger, it is your one shot at not having regrets and that is the thing that will eat you up for the rest of your life.
>> This is the time where they’re going to call you even though you signed all this legal paperwork, your mom has a cold, do you want to treat it?
>> You don’t do flu vaccines anymore.
>> This is the conviction it takes and this is hard and we’ve made that decision for Mom a couple times already. So we’re way over time.
>> And finally and I try and remember this, the tragedy is the disease, not the ending. Right? People have said Roger’s death was a tragedy and I’m like, no, the tragedy was the three to five years before that, right? That was the tragedy. Tragedy is over. Thank you.
>>
[applause].
