My heart goes out to you all. My father died of Alzheimers at age 69. Someone once corrected me rather patronizingly and said that no one dies of Alzheimers, so I said, okay, he died of pneumonia (which he wouldn't have gotten had he not had Alzheimers), if that makes you happy. It's a horrid disease. Fortunately, as a veteran with a service-connected partial disability (injured aboard ship in blackout conditions in WWII), we were able to find a fairly decent nursing home for the last six months of his life whose costs the VA covered, more or less.
Regardless of my opinion of Proxmire's politics, I do sympathize with his family.
Alzheimers clouds the autonomic functions as well as the conscience functions of the brain in the later stages. Breathing, heart pumping etc.