Personal Narrative: My Grandma's Progression Through Later Adulthood

Later adulthood and tracking my grandmother’s progression through Alzheimer’s disease As people continue to age, they will eventually become “elderly” and enter into the later adulthood stage of life. Elderly people have more time to reflect upon their lives and that’s perhaps why they enter into Erickson’s socioemotional ego integrity versus despair stage. Basically, what defines this stage is that old people will either be within ego integrity and have a positive or accepting nature of their life, including mistakes or they will despair and have a negative outlook on their life full of regrets and should haves that can’t be changed (Arnett, 2012). What this means is that most elderly people will be socioemotionally content or fuel potential anguish which can influence their outlook of life as a whole. Arnett goes on to say that “The physical and cognitive problems that become more common in the course of late adulthood
My grandma has been unfortunate enough to have had this disease for the last 21 years and is now in the last stages of it, so I have experience with the whole side of it to contrast with. According to Arnett (2012, pp.555), “[The elderly tend] to have difficulties performing activities of daily living (ADLs) such as bathing, dressing, food preparation, and eating”. In the case of my grandmother, once her Alzheimer’s onset at age 58 she had exponentially increasing challenges performing ADLs. According to Arnett, “There is an early onset form of Alzheimer’s disease, occurring before age 65, which clearly has a genetic basis…However this kind of Alzheimer’s accounts for only about 5% of cases” (2012, pp.572). So my grandma has the rare form of the disease which is illustrated by her mother having the disease also; which is the genetic factor mentioned