Art critic Hilton Kramer, who died March 27, spent his last months in the Vicarage by the Sea in Harpswell, Maine, a residential home with a nontraditional approach to caring for those with advanced dementia. “Before Kramer moved into the Vicarage last June from their home in Damariscotta, his widow said, his disease had advanced to the point where he rarely spoke. The man who founded the intellectual magazine New Criterion, and who had served as the chief art critic of The New York Times, had lost all interest in his field,” Matt Hongoltz-Hetling reports in a striking piece in The Forecaster. (H/t to Edgar Beem.) Previous care kept Kramer heavily medicated, isolated, limited his mobility, and had him putting on 30 pounds. At the Vicarage, Hongoltz-Hetling writes, they reduced Kramer’s medication and embrace patients’ behaviors. “‘If someone wants to go for a walk, we let them go for a walk,’ [founder Johanna] Wigg said. ‘We go with them.’ And if someone develops a desire to kiss the hands of all those he encounters, as Kramer did, the Vicarage doesn’t try to quash that desire with medication. … ‘His affect all came back,’ Wigg said.”