Creating My Tombstone Was Just the Beginning By Wally Klatch

By Wally Klatch

Dementia destroys. Preparing for my demise has included planning and arranging all the steps that need to take place, so this won’t fall on my family. The way life (and death) works, I thought planning for my gravestone would be the end of this process. I was wrong.

As dementia continues to work its way through my brain, a different feeling has developed in me. My brain/thinking is going down, and my guts/feelings are increasing, as if my feelings are taking over some of the space in me that has been freed up by my decreasing thinking. I was always more of a thinker than a feeler, and now I feel there is more of a balance between the two. It’s a different way of living life.

Planning my gravestone shows this exactly. My thinking-self would have gone with the regular flow: a piece of granite with my name, my parents’ names, and my dates of birth and death.

But I was feeling something different. It wasn’t clear, but I was already paying attention to what I was feeling, together with what I was thinking. I’d also learned how important words are, and had created a “Vocabulary” page on my website, TheAlzheimersConversation.com, with dementia-related words that I have invented because they didn’t exist in the English language. In this case, it was much simpler — I use the word “Gravestone” for what my mind was thinking about it, and “Tombstone” for what my guts were feeling about it. I wouldn’t have imagined it, but creating my Tombstone has been one of the most meaningful steps for me as I’ve been dealing with my dementia. 

It took several weeks of exploring to create my Tombstone. This exploration included feeling, thinking, remembering, identifying my values, and much more — and as part of this, to sort out for me how a “Tombstone” is different than a “Gravestone.” How is my Tombstone different than a eulogy or my life story, or anything else about me?

From this came my personal Tombstone, which for me is a 20-word expression of what I feel that I have brought into the world. My 20-word Tombstone (twenty words out of respect for how much could be written on a regular gravestone) also includes a two-minute radio broadcast during which someone describes an example of something I did as my Tombstone describes. And now that’s it, I am done creating my Tombstone. To read more about this process, go to CreatingMyTombstone.com. 

Once I had accomplished creating my Tombstone, that should have been it. But sitting right in front of me was what I feel I’ve brought into the world: to feel situations I’m in, and to bring my energies to make the situations richer for the people they touch. Yes, I have dementia, but I’m also still living, so my Tombstone is also my Lifestone — a beacon for how I should live whatever life I have left. I had never heard of a Lifestone, but now I have one, playing a very active role in my life!

My brain is deteriorating, and I know what is to come. Put bluntly, I will cease to be me, and for many people, this stage means becoming a horribly nasty, offensive, and unbearable person. There will be a physically living body that will be identifiable as mine, but nothing about it will be me. At this stage, my Tombstone may serve my family as something to relate to as me, that my energies will continue to be me even though my mind is somewhere else. I very much believe that It’s~A~Resonating~World, and that my energies will still be very much connected to my family’s energies even after our cognitive and physical separation. What I mean by “energies” is that what we think of now as physical things are actually “energies” that are constantly interacting with other “things” that are also actually energies. My “energies” are what I leave behind after I’m physically gone – how my family and other people think of me and remember me, how I’ve encouraged and influenced them to bring their authentic selves and other good things to the world, and how actions I’ve taken have had a ripple effect in influencing some corners of the world. Everyone has and leaves these energies, and I’m relating to them as part of my dementia process.

Eventually, my body will die, and I’ll be dead, and another beautiful result of my Tombstone will happen. There is a tradition in the Jewish faith that when someone visits a gravestone, they should leave a small stone on it. My Tombstone says that what I bring is to feel situations I’m in, and to bring my energies to make the situations richer for the people they touch. When someone asked how they could leave a stone on my Tombstone if it’s just words (at 41:02 of www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRHdmNlxEfQ), the way they can leave a stone is completely clear: find a situation in your own life where your good energies will help, and as you bring your energies to help that situation, whisper softly that this is a stone on Wally’s Tombstone. I’m hopeful that even after I am gone, my life can continue to bring good to the world as I had hoped.

Wally Klatch, 71, was diagnosed with Early-Stage Dementia in October 2022. He received his undergraduate degree from Indiana University and his Master’s Degree in Management from Purdue University. He worked as a Management Consultant to large and mid-sized companies in the areas of Organization and Operations, and spent thirty years living in Israel. Since being diagnosed, his condition has been connected by several neurologists to different brain conditions, including Parkinson’s Disease and brain spikes, among others. While his thought functionality is declining, his emotional awareness has increased, and he maintains functionality even while his relationship to himself and to his world is shifting.