Demenz als Metapher oder vom Glück und Elend des Vergessens. Eine religionsgerontologische Deutung

Abstract

Dementia is a social disease. Many are affected. Dementia has also become a metaphor. The forgetting-disease stands for the suffering and lost independence of the aging. Above all, however, it means that those who are affected are unable to tell the end of their own stories. A practical theology that is sensitive to dementia seeks sound possibilities to address these fractured life stories. Such a theology draws attention to the memorial community – the church – and to the fact that forgetting can be reinterpreted in the horizon of remembering God. In light of this interpretation, the illness is not terrifying, but also an allegory and a memorial for the humanness in the torso of fragmentary existence.