She turned her diagnosis into a command to live life passionately, leading to a 12-page New York Times profile and a new career as a public speaker.
Geri Taylor, whose openhearted disclosures about the ravages of Alzheimer’s were so striking that they made her a public spokeswoman for people with the disease, died on Aug. 4 in Danbury, Conn. She was 81.
The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s, her husband, Jim Taylor, said.
Ms. Taylor, a former nurse, brought her profession’s competence, knowledge and frankness to her second career as an activist. She and Mr. Taylor became frequent interviewees in news articles about Alzheimer’s, activists in Washington and lecturers for audiences of patients and researchers. They spoke jointly to more than 15,000 people, Mr. Taylor said.
All of that followed from a 21,000-word profile of the Taylors published in The New York Times in 2016 — the product of 20 months of work by the reporter N.R. Kleinfield, a specialist in writing stories about people of little fame but great significance.
The “familiar face of Alzheimer’s,” Mr. Kleinfield wrote, was “the withered person with the scrambled mind marooned in a nursing home.” But there was also, he added, something else: “the beginning, the waiting period, which Geri Taylor has been navigating with prudence, grace and hope.”
Ms. Taylor first learned she was developing Alzheimer’s in 2012, when she was 69, after she had the uncanny experience of looking in the mirror and not recognizing her own face.
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