My Learning Curve

Just when I thought I knew who my audience was, I discovered a group that I hadn’t consciously considered before. Here’s what happened. I was asked to speak about Dementia Diary at a Catholic university. My audience consisted of quite a few Nuns with caregiver responsibilities for Sisters afflicted with various kinds of dementia. Until then, I thought of my readers as mostly children or spouses of loved ones. Since then I've realized that the group is so much broader than that and so is my thinking. Dementia affects ALL categories of human beings...so, of course, members of religious communities, unmarried adults, significant others, residents of group homes, etc., etc., etc., all can have people in cognitive decline and caregivers struggling with their welfare. In retrospect, that should have been obvious—but my learning curve finally caught up with the reality.