What You Need To Know About Dying With Dementia
Dementia is often described as a long goodbye—an extended separation that slowly takes away the person we love. But as Christians, we know that death, even with dementia, is not the final word.
Today we explore what Scripture says about death, suffering, and the eternal hope we have through Christ.
Is Dementia the Worst Death?
Many people believe dementia is the worst way to die because it gradually erodes memories, independence, and relationships. But as Christians, we must look at death through a different lens.
The worst death in history wasn’t caused by disease—it happened on the cross. Jesus, the only sinless man, endured the ultimate separation from God so that we would never have to. His sacrifice gives us the assurance that even in suffering, even in dementia, there is hope beyond death.
Why Does Dementia Exist?
Dementia is not part of God’s original design.
Genesis 1:31 tells us that God created the world good, without disease, suffering, or separation. But because of the Fall, sin and death entered the world (Romans 5:12).
Every illness—whether dementia, cancer, or heart disease—is a result of the brokenness of creation. But that’s not the end of the story.
Understanding Death as Separation
One of the hardest parts of dementia is its slow, painful separation. Unlike sudden illnesses, dementia takes years, making caregivers grieve in small pieces over time.
Yet, Scripture reminds us:
📖 “It is appointed for man to die once, and after this comes the judgment.” – Hebrews 9:27
Death is inevitable, but for believers, it is not the end. Those in Christ will never be permanently separated from Him.
Holding on to Hope
As caregivers, we are reminded daily that this world is temporary. But dementia caregiving isn’t just about loss—it’s also an opportunity to demonstrate God’s love and faithfulness.
Through caregiving, we learn:
✅ Patience – Caring for someone who is slowly slipping away teaches us to trust God’s timing.
✅ Compassion – We reflect Christ’s love when we care for those who cannot care for themselves.
✅ Faith – Walking through this journey with God strengthens our trust in His promises.
The good news? Death doesn’t win. If your loved one is a believer, you will be reunited in eternity—fully restored and whole in Christ.
Are you feeling weighed down by the reality of dementia and death?
Remember:
🔹 Dementia is not the worst thing that can happen—eternal separation from God is.
🔹 Your loved one’s soul is secure in Christ, even when their memory fades.
🔹 You are not alone—God has not left you without hope or help.
Read more:
251. How To Biblically Reframe Dying with Dementia With Hope
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Facing Death and Dementia
[0:01] Death is hard, and dementia can make it even harder. But as Christians, we know that the worst death wasn’t from disease. It was on the cross. So how do we face the reality of dying with dementia while holding on to hope? In today’s episode, we’re going to look at what Scripture says about death, suffering, and the promise that dementia doesn’t have to have the final word. Hey Christian Care Companion, welcome to Dementia Caregiver Support for Christians, where we equip Bible-believing Christians with biblical wisdom and practical help for dementia caregiving. If you are a spouse or an adult child or the family member of a person living with dementia, this podcast is for you. Here we show you how to think differently about dementia caregiving. We make it clear and simple and easy for you to change your caregiving results from chaos to calm.
[1:04] If you have recently started listening to this podcast, I am so excited you’re here. That may mean, however, that you have not heard one of my solo episodes before. In December and January, I did an experiment, which was to do dementia caregiver support in action episodes, which are short coaching style episodes where you can come on to the Ask the Dementia Coach monthly question and answer session and actually be coached by me related to your specific challenges or your specific problems. And so for about a month and a half now, we’ve been doing those episodes so that I could see if that was something that was helpful and beneficial to you. So this is one of a new pattern. I’m going back to the old pattern, which is maybe new for some people, and that is to do one coaching style episode
Understanding Dementia’s Reality
[2:01] a week and then another episode as a solo episode. And so today’s episode is a solo episode. And what we’re going to talk about is what do we actually need to know about dying with dementia?
[2:15] Recently, I met with somebody and I forgot who it was. And I’m really struggling to remember where the conversation occurred, but we were sitting and this person, oh, I remember this was at a networking event, and this person said to me that dementia is the worst death ever. And at that moment in time, I did not have a good and ready answer. But afterwards, as I was reflecting on it, I recognized that this person was entirely wrong. Dementia is not the worst death ever. The worst death ever is the fact that our Lord Jesus Christ had to die on the cross for you and me. And so that made me think about doing this episode. What do we as Christians need to really understand about dying with dementia or dying from dementia? That’s a whole nother episode. We’ll do that another day. But I wanted to just bring this forward today and just briefly really sit with you and try to reframe how you think about dementia. Because the thing that I’m really starting to conclude the longer I do this is our thoughts are so powerful and what we think and believe about dementia will, in essence, give us the results that we get from this journey.
God’s Creation and Human Struggles
[3:37] So today’s podcast is going to be done in four brief quick little points.
[3:43] Number one, God created the earth and he created it good. Number two, the fall brought sin and death into the world. Number three, we all are going to die and death is separation. And then lastly, dementia isn’t the worst death. The death on the cross is the worst death ever. So let’s go to point number one. God created the earth and he created the world good. At the beginning of Genesis, Genesis 1 verse 31, God saw all that he had made and behold, he said it was very good. However, man kind of messed things up, right? So dementia isn’t part of God’s original design. No death, no disease, no injury, no weeds, no tears were a part of God’s original design. And God, when he created the earth, he created us to be in relationship with him and with one another. So when God created Adam, he created the first relationship, us, with him, and then he gave Adam, a wife, Eve, and he created Adam and Eve to be in relationship with one another.
[5:06] And so one of the biggest challenges that dementia brings, and we don’t think about it in this way, we think about it in a lot of different ways, but the difficulty that we experience with dementia is because it changes our relationships. If you are a spouse who is helping somebody else, who is their husband or wife of 20, 35, 58 years, however long it is, dementia changes the relationship. If you’re the daughter helping her parent living with dementia.
[5:42] Dementia changes the relationship. But it is not how it was originally in the garden because God created the world good. And dementia is not a part of that good original design. And so the first thing I want you to think about when we think about dementia is that one of the biggest struggles, one of the biggest stressors, one of the biggest opportunities that we have when we are helping somebody with dementia is maintaining that relationship. So that’s the first thing. The second thing I wanted to bring to your mind as we’re talking about what you need to know about dying with dementia is that Adam’s fall,
The Fall and Its Consequences
[6:28] the fall, brought sin and death into the world. Because Adam fell, we have dementia that we are now contending with. Romans 5 verse 12 says, therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world.
[6:43] And death through sin. And so death spread to all mankind. The reality of the matter is the wages of sin is death, and the brokenness of the fall actually contributed to the disease and destruction that we contend with every single day. And so even though dementia isn’t part of the good creation. It is a result of the fall from Adam into sin and death. And as a result of that, we actually have to contend with all sorts of diseases, cancer and car accidents and heart attacks and strokes, you name it. The reality of the matter is the world isn’t as God created it anymore. But that is also not the end of the story, is it? Right? Because we know, if you are a believer, that there is another side to this equation. Which brings us to the third point. All of us are going to die.
The Nature of Death
[7:47] And death is separation. Death is separation from everything that we know here on earth, right? I have a beginning when I was conceived, but I will never have an end. My end will be, I will live for eternity now, not in this particular body, but me as a soul, as a created being, am going to live forever. And there are only two places, right? You can either be in heaven with Jesus and God, or you’ll be in his presence, but you will be in his presence in his wrath, not his love, right? But we are all going to die, and we know this, and death is difficult because death is separation. Hebrews 9.29 said, it is appointed for man to die once, and after this comes the judgment.
[8:35] Right? So death separates us from those people that we love. And that is one of the hardest parts of death is because it separates us. Not only does it separate our body and our soul eternally, but it separates us from the people that we love and the people that love us. And so death is the final breaking of our relationship here on earth. One of the challenges is that dementia is a slow separator of people. It is a slow, constant change, and it is a constant reminder. It is a daily reminder when you are helping somebody you love living with dementia that we are separating towards death. And I believe that that is one of the challenges that we have with dementia because lots of other diseases, actually, the more I do this, the more I recognize that when we are passing away from a different type of a process like cancer. I had a close friend in church, actually several people over the years that have died of different types of cancer that I’ve known. And even though cancer is killing them, it is killing them in a different way.
[9:50] And oftentimes the last several weeks of their life or several days sometimes of their life, they actually go through the same stages of change towards passing away that a person living with dementia goes through. The biggest difference is it is shorter. So that separation is quick. Dementia is like a crockpot. It’s not like a microwave. And so cancer can sometimes be like a microwave and people go quickly through towards their death, whereas dementia is more like a crockpot. So we see all of these changes slowly, slowly, slowly coming over time. And it is a constant reminder for us that we are living in a fallen world and that the ultimate separator is going to be death. And that is one of the reasons that dementia feels so challenging for people.
Hope Beyond Dementia
[10:49] But here’s the point I wanted to make with today’s podcast. Dementia isn’t the worst death ever. The death on the cross was the worst death ever. You and I, every single one of us, and the people we love, we are all sinners. We are created in the image of God, but we have fallen away from that, and we need a Redeemer, and that Redeemer is Christ.
[11:16] And 2 Corinthians 5 verse 21 said, He made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf.
[11:26] So that we might become the righteousness of God in him. Jesus Christ came, was born a man, 100% fully man and fully God, and he lived a perfect sinless life, and then he was crucified and died on the cross for you and me, for every single one of his elect people. And so death from dementia, or old age, or cancer, or car accidents, heart attacks, strokes, whatever they are. That is what we as sinners deserve. The wages of sin is death. We deserve to be separated from God.
[12:12] God gave us a way back to him through Jesus’s death, the sinless man on the cross, and that was and is the worst death ever, was talking to my husband at lunch about the podcast I’m going to record. And he said to me something very interesting. He said, in our humanity, we cannot truly fathom what that actually means, that a sinless God-man took on sin for us and died for our sake on the cross, that he, as Jesus, endured the ultimate separation because he, for us, was separated from God for a period of time. And because of that, we will never be separated from the love of God through Christ Jesus. And so therefore, dementia and death do not have the final word. If you are a Christian, if you are a believer listening to today’s podcast, you have eternal hope. Yes, Dementia has challenges, but it also brings us opportunities.
Finding Peace in Caregiving
[13:20] Yes, death hurts. It is the ultimate separator of us from the people we love here on earth. But if your loved one is a believer, and if you are a believer, then you know that there is hope. I met recently with two of my clients whose parent both just recently passed away. Angela, her mom recently passed away, and Pam, her mom recently passed away. I had helped them through their dementia caregiving journey for the last year to year and a half of their journey where we walked together. And my question to them was, what was it that working with me actually brought them? And both of them said, clarity and peace and sanity and knowing where we were going and what we needed to do to make this journey easier for you as a family caregiver of somebody living with dementia. So if you haven’t yet joined me for one of my free monthly workshops, I do them once a month and the next one is actually tomorrow.
[14:29] It’ll be February the 8th. So if you’re listening to this episode as it drops, You still have time to register. I invite you to come. I promise you they’re wonderful two-hour workshops. They’re very interactive, and you have an opportunity to interact with me afterwards.
[14:45] But just to recap today’s episode, what do you need to know about dying with dementia? We need to know that this is not the worst death ever. We need to remember God created the world good, that the fall brought in sin and death, that we are all going to die, and that death is a separation from the people
Embracing Hope and Resurrection
[15:05] we love and that the worst death ever was Jesus’s death on the cross for my sin and for your sin. And so therefore, we cannot live in the light of a dementia caregiving journey in despair because we as Christians have hope in the future and we have hope in the resurrection. So I truly hope that this episode today will bless you in a different way, that you will remember as you are navigating this, that I’m here for you, that God has not left you without means. And if you’re ready to hop into a more structured or formal way of working together, I invite you to hop on my calendar and I will be glad to give you the first step that you need to take to actually make this journey easier. Thank you for listening. I’m excited you guys are here.
[16:11] Next episode is going to be another coaching style episode, a dementia caregiver support in action episode. And what we’re going to talk about is how you as a caregiver need to let go of caregiver guilt and shame. And as I try to remember to end my episodes, may the Lord bless you and keep you, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
