A Dallas-area senior living executive has turned her own family's Alzheimer's journey into a tool meant to help other families hold onto the moments disease threatens to take away. Vanessa Fernandes-Randall, chief operating officer of Tradition Senior Living, created Still Me, a keepsake activity book designed to help families connect through memory activities, movement, conversation prompts, photographs and familiar songs.
Fernandes-Randall drew directly from her own life in building the project, according to CBS News Texas, which reported she was inspired by her own mother's Alzheimer's diagnosis five years earlier. Over the summer, her mother died, and Fernandes-Randall has said the book preserved some of their most meaningful moments together even as the disease progressed.
From Personal Project to Public Resource
What began as something personal recently became something shareable. Last month, Fernandes-Randall made Still Me available to the public, the station's report notes, opening up a tool she first built for her own family to others navigating the same diagnosis.
The need such a resource addresses is substantial in North Texas. The Alzheimer’s Association Greater Dallas says it provides education and support to all those facing Alzheimer's and other dementias throughout its community, and its estimates paint a picture of the disease's local reach: Dallas County had an estimated 37,700 residents age 65 and older living with Alzheimer’s dementia in 2020, equal to 12.6 percent of that age group, per the Alzheimer’s Association.
A Disease With a Statewide Toll
Zoom out and the numbers grow starker still. The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that 459,300 Texans age 65 and older were living with Alzheimer’s dementia in 2020, and over 1,287,000 family members and friends are providing care for them, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. Nationally, the organization estimates more than 7 million Americans age 65 and older are living with the disease, the same figure cited in the station's coverage of Fernandes-Randall's project.
Separate Alzheimer’s Association figures for Texas underscore how the burden has grown. An association facts-and-figures report found that 11.9 percent of Texas adults over 65 have Alzheimer’s, and that the state recorded 9,887 deaths from the disease in 2024, while Texas Alzheimer’s deaths had risen 227.8 percent through 2021. The same report puts the 2025 Medicaid cost of caring for Texans with Alzheimer’s at $4.3 billion.
Preserving What Remains
Against that backdrop, Fernandes-Randall's book is a small but deeply personal response to a disease that erodes memory and strains families and caregivers alike. For her, the project became a way to hold onto connection with her mother even as Alzheimer's progressed, and now stands as something other families coping with a similar diagnosis can use for themselves.
