This has to do with comments that are unsupportive and also irritating to hear, namely remarks such as “I forget all the time too” or “my spouse does that a lot also” or some such comment. I recognize that what is said is intended to be helpful. But I believe such statements are quite unsupportive. First such a comment gives the sense of discounting what is being experience by the person with Alzheimer’s. It gives the sense of not really being heard, understood, or even simply listened to. Second, most likely what you or the other person has been experiencing is not the same thing as what the person with Alzheimer’s is talking about. I know. I know what it is like to simply forget my keys and then finally find them, just like all of us may do at some time or another. I still find myself experiencing this kind of forgetting now and then. But I also, experience the forgetting in which a large, empty place is felt with the forgetting. It is where there is a sense of complete blankness. There is a void. It is a loss this is accompanied by no sense of how to resolve the problem, how to think, how to get what you need, what to do at that moment. This is what I mean by a “void”.
A View From Within, Thaddeus Raushi, p 31-21
They talked about her as if she weren't sitting the wing chair, a few feet away. They talked about her, in front of her, as if she were deaf. They talked about her, in front of her, without including her, as if she had Alzheimer's disease.
Still Alice, Lisa Genova, p. 225