loving a person with dementia has taught me:

"Life will break you.  Nobody can protect you from that, 

and living alone won't either, 

for solitude will also break you with its yearning.  

You have to love.  You have to feel.  It is the reason you are here on earth.  

You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up.  

And when it happens that you are broken, 

or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, 

let yourself sit by an apple tree 

and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness.  

Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could. "

                  Louise Erdrich,  from The Painted Drum