Day to Day Dementia started with Lori.

The woman before the diagnosis

Lori Kruzich-Newell was born in Bellingham, Washington, in the Year of the Dragon — which she liked to call being a "Dragon's Dragon." It fit her. She was strong-willed and brilliant, able to accomplish almost anything with precision and a little flare. Competitive. Head-strong in a way that could move mountains. Fearsome in a disagreement, and almost impossible to budge once she'd made up her mind.

She built a career most people never see the inside of — mainframe computers at Bull/Honeywell, then thirteen years at Abbott Laboratories as a field service engineer, installing and repairing complex medical lab equipment across the western United States and Alaska. She was named Field Service Representative of the Year three times. She later earned a bachelor's degree in Information Systems Security with a 4.0, and her team once won a Google "hack-athon," outscoring even the University of Washington. This was a woman who could diagnose and fix the machines hospitals depend on.

A life, and a decade of giving it away

We met across a bar where I cooked; she came in on Sundays to watch the Seahawks, and the owners helped set us up. We had a good life — road trips with no destination ("Which direction — north, south, east, or west?"), classic-car shows, New Orleans and Hawaii, fifty thousand miles of two-lane highway.

And she gave herself away to her community. She volunteered with the Bonney Lake Police Department, helped run a food bank that served close to 300 families a week, and spent four years in the jury room at the county courthouse — more than 10,000 hours over seven or eight years. When she was well, she was unstoppable.

When something started to change

It's hard to say exactly when the disease began. Looking back, the signs were there for years before any of us named them — missed bills and a water-shutoff notice, money moved the wrong direction between accounts, getting lost on a familiar drive, a burner left on until the house filled with gas. The woman who repaired medical equipment for a living couldn't follow a recipe anymore.

Finding out what was wrong was its own ordeal: doctor after doctor and dozens of tests across 2015, three neurologists before we found one who could actually help. The answer came in early 2016 — Alzheimer's, confirmed by ruling out every treatable cause and then by an amyloid PET scan. The official date was March 3, 2016. She was in her forties.

The long goodbye

Lori faced it with more grace than I knew was possible. She said it was in God's hands, not ours. In 2016 she still knew me. By 2018 it was slipping away — the restless, tearful afternoons of sundowning, the wandering, the crying because she couldn't say why she was confused.

On Christmas of 2018, she looked at me and asked, "Are you the nice man that helps me get ready for bed?" That was the first time my wife didn't know me. I've never found words big enough for that moment, so I'll just leave it there.

I moved her into memory care that year and came nearly every day to take her for a drive or read to her. The disease took her dignity in pieces, and we met each day as gently as we could. Lori died in 2021.

She was a dragon

I once wrote in my notebook, "I was married to the girl with five dragon tattoos. She was a dragon." I keep saying it, because the disease wants you to remember only what it left behind. It doesn't get the last word. She was a dragon — fierce, brilliant, unforgettable. The woman at the beginning of this story is the real one. The illness was only the ending.

Near the end I realized I would become the only person who had known her across our twenty years — the keeper of our whole life together. For a while that felt like a weight too heavy to hold. Then I understood it as a kind of trust: I'm the place where she still lives. And the moment I tell her story, I stop being the only one carrying it.

Why I built this

I learned everything the hard way — the symptoms, the doctors, the placement, the grief that starts long before the death. What I didn't have was a map. No one hands you one. You're improvising in a parking lot, after a fall, on a road that millions of families walk and almost no one talks about honestly.

That's why Day to Day Dementia exists. It's the thing I needed and couldn't find — straight, warm, practical company for people walking the same road, built by someone who has actually walked it. Lori spent her life fixing complicated systems and giving her time to her community. It feels right that her story becomes the reason other caregivers feel a little less alone.

This is for the road that doesn't have a map. It's for Lori.

— Anthony Newell, Founder

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