Winner, International Impact Book Award — Health/Dementia Category
What if dementia didn’t mean the end of connection — but the beginning of something deeper?
When someone you love has dementia, visits can feel awkward, painful, or exhausting. You want to connect, but conversations stall. Silence creeps in. You leave wondering if you did or said the right thing.
How Old Are You Today? Dementia, A Mother, A Daughter, and The Game That Transformed Their Lives is both a deeply personal caregiving memoir and a simple, practical game you can use with a loved one living with dementia.
When Glenna Hecht’s mother was diagnosed with dementia, Glenna was thrown into caregiving without a roadmap. She read the books. She joined the groups. She tried to do everything to “fix it.” But dementia is not something you fix — it is something you face.
Then one day, she asked a simple question:
“How old are you?”
Her mother answered, “Guess.”
That question opened the door to memories, stories, laughter, and moments of real connection. What began as a single question became a ritual. The ritual became a game. And the game transformed how mother and daughter spent the final years of life together.
In this book, you’ll discover:
The How Old Are You Today? game — a simple, repeatable way to connect with someone living with dementia
The art of the game — how you show up
The rules of the game — how you play
Real stories from nine years of dementia caregiving — the hard moments, the funny ones, and the unexpectedly beautiful ones
How to shift visits from “What do I say?” to “I’m glad I came”
This is not a clinical guide or a step-by-step medical manual.
It’s a real-life story of love, loss, patience, and presence — paired with a tool you can actually use, starting today, whether you’re a daughter, son, spouse, friend, or caregiver.
Over time, Glenna came to understand something she never expected to say:
Dementia was one of the greatest gifts of her life — not because it was easy, but because it taught her how to stay connected when everything else was slipping away.
How Old Are You Today? offers hope, relief, and a way forward — not by fixing dementia, but by changing how we show up for the people we love.
