Etymology

Noun

1. Nickname for Alzheimer's disease, especially for the final phase of the disease, during which the patient suffers a progressive decline of cognitive and motor skills and gradually loses the ability to recognize and to communicate with family and friends.; nickname for the relationship between a person suffering from Alzheimer's disease and that person's family or friends.
   • 1995, "Love and Loss: Tim Ryan: A husband's anguish," People, vol. 43, no. 8 (27 Feb):

     They call Alzheimer's the long goodbye. And the difficulty of the long goodbye is that you grieve from the moment you first hear about it, because it's incurable.

   • 1999, Kevin Axe, "Saints Alive!" U.S. Catholic, vol. 64, no. 11:

     Then my father-in-law died of Alzheimer's in 1998, and my mother-in-law got the same disease. . . . We are grateful we get to be with her, to pray with her, to sing with her during her long goodbye.

   • 2000, David Stripp, "Blessings from the Book of Life," Fortune, vol. 141, no. 5 (6 Mar):

     Biotech pioneers will seek out the genetic bad actors behind our worst scourges, from arthritis to Alzheimer's. . . . Gene-inspired drugs to blunt diseases of aging will begin arriving to help deal with the T. rex of demographic trends: the baby-boomers' long goodbye.

   • 2006, M. Vestergaard et al., "The Study of Alzheimer’s Disease Biomarkers," NanoBiotechnology, vol. 2, no. 1-2, p. 5:

     The disease is often referred to as the “Long-Goodbye” because the person with the illness slowly becomes lost to everyone a long time before the body finally gives out.