Exactly, as I've mentioned elsewhere, both my grandmothers got Alzheimers, and I have basically nothing but a couple of vague memories of them for the last few years of each of their lives, but their partners spent years tending to people who were already gone, both seeing them whither away, but also in effect losing so much of what was left of their own lives.

To me, they pretty much died once they stopped recognizing us. For one of them that was very soon after we realised something was wrong, and yet her body survived a decade after her mind was gone and it was awful seeing how it reduced her husband who spent all of those years in the same nursing home doing nothing but tending to her.

My other grandfather died of cancer a few years into his wife's alzheimers hospitalisation and frankly it feels to me like he got the better way out of him and his wife (but largely because it was a very aggressive cancer and he went during an attempted operation; maybe I'd have thought differently about it if he'd struggled with it for years).