Kenny Chesney – My Alzheimer's Story

Dear Mr. Chesney,

I love your song “While He Still Knows Who I Am,” but would you write another one please?

I am a dementia care advocate who learned about dementia through lived experience with my mom. She died in August 2016.

One of the tragedies of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias is that many family members and friends of people who live with dementia think the person is “gone” when she or he no longer easily recognize family and friends, and so the family and friends stop visiting the person who is living with dementia. This is heartbreaking because this is when love, connection and compassion are most needed by the person who is living with dementia.

It really doesn’t matter if a person living with dementia recognizes us or not. We need to ask ourselves why we get so focused on the recognition part instead of on loving, connecting and being compassionate.

Furthermore, a great deal of healing, love and bonding may be shared by both the person living with dementia and friends and family until the very end. I can’t emphasize how life affirming and deeply spiritual this can be for all involved.

Your song is beautiful and touching, but it infers that people living with dementia are not worth seeing once they don’t recognize us. In fact, the worst thing we can do when a person living with dementia doesn’t recognize us anymore is to stop spending time with him or her. That’s why I’m writing to ask you to please produce another song that will encourage family members and friends to keep spending time with their loved ones who live with dementia, ESPECIALLY when their loved ones don’t know them anymore.

Mr. Chesney, in your audio commentary about “While He Still Knows Who I Am,” you say the song is “heavy” and as the narrator you “have a responsibility.” Please take your responsibility to heart and give us another song that will encourage family and friends to remain connected with people who live with dementia until the very end.

Thank you,

Susan Macaulay
Dementia Care Advocate

https://myalzheimersstory.com/2015/04/09/20-great-questions-to-ask-when-a-loved-one-with-dementia-doesnt-recognize-you-anymore/

http://handsoffmybrain.com/2018/10/are-you-my-mother

https://myalzheimersstory.com/2015/01/21/it-doesnt-matter-that-mom-doesnt-know-me-anymore/

#mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; }
/* Add your own MailChimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block.
We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */

Subscribe to MAS now & get 5 free PDFs & a page of welcome links:

Email Address

Take my short survey on behaviour here.

Kenny Chesney’s song While He Still Knows Who I Am is about love, connection and re-discovering a father-son relationship. It made me cry. It may make you cry as well.

But does it send the right message about people who live with dementia, and when and how family and friends should love and connect with them? I don’t think so.

The title and lyrics infer the son is going to visit his dad while the father still knows who the son is. But what happens when father no longer recognizes son? Will the son then not go to visit? That’s the implication.

I was so saddened by the inference that I wrote an open letter to Kenny Chesney asking him to write another song — one that encourages friends and family members to visit people with dementia especially when those people don’t recognize them anymore.

I wonder if he will.