Desmond O’Grady is a Jesuit priest who served in many prominent positions throughout Ireland. He was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He shares what living with the disease has taught him and how it has changed the way he lives life. There may well come a time, the one I dread, you know, when I won’t know you’re Pat. I won’t recognize that I’ve met you before. And that, I know, with my sister, not know, that to me…I just so love being with people and doing things with people and I’ve been uplifted by people, that the thought that all that could be gone, that brings, as you can see, tears to my eyes. Yeah, I suppose I could say I trust in God, and that is true, but there is also with me just a sense of, ‘Live the life you’ve got,’ and I will live it as best I can as long as I’m given the life to live. And I’ve lived through difficulties, as I was telling you about my childhood experiences. Alzheimer’s dementia now. Failure in work at various things. I’ve set out on a few projects and then said, ‘I’m not up to this.’ Failures in relationships. And they’re all sad and hurtful, but there’s much more to life than all of those. A lot of these, certainly, relationship failures we’ve mended. They’re the ones I want to mend. I don’t like it go away. And even where I can’t mend it with the other person, I mend it in myself. I know I just keep wishing them well.

MORE STORIES

Basil Brave Heart

Here’s another time my grandmother taught me about forgiveness. We used to go out and pick cherries and plums. Before we started picking the fruit, she would take a little bread and some dried meat, and we would go sit down on the canvas, and then she’d make a prayer: ‘These plums are our relatives,…

VIEW THIS STORY

Constance Caruso

It is never too late to become who you might have been. I was tomorrow’s woman in the 1950s, and I didn’t fit. I was in a job that didn’t fit me because they wouldn’t pay attention that there was somebody in here. I had no sense of my capability. So, I lived each day…

VIEW THIS STORY

Desmond O’Grady, SJ

Desmond O’Grady is a Jesuit priest who served in many prominent positions throughout Ireland. He was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He shares what living with the disease has taught him and how it has changed the way he lives life.

VIEW THIS STORY

Christine Nampande

After my husband died in 1989, his relatives attempted to evict me from our family house and land. I decided to rent land for cultivation. I had to travel four miles from home to that land every day with a child on my back. But I thank God that I reported the case and the…

VIEW THIS STORY

Desmond O’Grady, SJ

Desmond O’Grady is a Jesuit priest who served in many prominent positions throughout Ireland. He was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He shares what living with the disease has taught him and how it has changed the way he lives life. [Interviewer] You have a great sense of, first of all, honesty. You tell the truth…

VIEW THIS STORY

Greg Boyle, SJ

With the help of parishioners and the local business community in Los Angeles, Greg Boyle has worked to build Homeboy Industries into one of the largest, most comprehensive, and most successful gang intervention, rehabilitation, and reentry programs in the United States. In this audio clip, he discusses the power of going to the margins. [Interviewer]…

VIEW THIS STORY