A Heideggerian hermeneutical phenomenological research method was used to investigate the lived experience of memory loss in twelve individuals with early-stage Alzheimer's disease or mild cognitive impairment. Nine women and the three men were interviewed to determine what their everyday experiences were like. Data analysis proceeded according to the seven-step method of textual analysis described by Diekelmann, Allen, and Tanner (1989), and incorporated the methods of Benner (1994), Thomas and Pollio (2002), and van Manen (1990). From the analysis of interview data three constitutive patterns were identified, consisting of themes and relational themes. The first pattern, experiencing breakdown, consisted of two themes, awakening to breakdown, and living with forgetting. The second constitutive pattern, temporality, consisted of three themes, being in the nothing, forgetting the past, and looking ahead, The constitutive pattern, managing forgetting, consisted of the four themes, remembering with cues, writing things down, recognizing what made remembering worse/better, and using laughter. The findings clearly show that dementia is more than an illness of cognitive losses and that embodiment is central to the experience of living with forgetting and remembering.
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