Preventing Her Shutdown is an inside look of what an ongoing caregiver spouse goes through in my desperate effort to keep my wife with Alzheimer’s “connected”. Very personal unloaded emotions are expressed and actions taken, never confided to anyone while slowly losing my wife. She doesn’t speak at all. She expresses only some sounds and shows a lot of anxiety. This becomes a real challenge trying to figure out what she wants and how she feels. How do we communicate? How do I talk to her? How does she tell me what she wants or needs? We both had to learn how to interact and communicate with each other. My desperation as a spouse caregiver is that we are constantly “connecting” as this alleviates my greatest fear of a “shutdown”. Detailed is how everyday, every moment I can, I try to create an opportunity to “connect”