Darcy Lohmiller: Why your Exit Plan won’t work against Alzheimer’s

(Mark Cornelison | University of Kentucky via AP file) University of Kentucky, Donna Wilcock, of the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, holds a brain in her lab in Lexington, Ky. She says that contrary to popular perception, "there are a lot of changes that happen in the aging brain that lead to dementia in addition to plaques and tangles." When I tell people about my mom’s Alzheimer’s, most people are confident this will never happen to them. Why not? Because they have an Exit Plan.

The plan is usually an intentional overdose, or something more fanciful like walking into the woods in subzero temperatures. In Michael Wolff’s 2012 essay “A Life Worth Ending,” the author describes his mother’s…