A familiar diagnosis: The justice’s husband died of the disease in 2009.

If Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, does indeed have Alzheimer’s disease, the diagnosis and what is likely to come from it would be familiar to her.

Her husband of more than 50 years died from complications of the disease in 2009.

O’Connor, 88, announced Tuesday that she has dementia and probably Alzheimer’s disease. Because of the advancing dementia, she has decided to retire from public life, she said in a released statement.

O’Connor retired from the court at 75, a relatively young age (for the court), and when she was in good health, to help care for her husband, John Jay O’Connor.

The two met at Stanford Law School, where they both worked at the Stanford Law Review, and married in 1952.

“He was assigned to work on an article with one of the school’s few female students, Sandra Day, and quickly fell in love with her,” John O’Connor’s obituary stated.

Both were attorneys in Phoenix, but Sandra moved into politics, and then to the courts. When she was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1981, John followed her to Washington, bringing along their three sons.

John worked at the law firm Fennemore Craig in Phoenix before the move to Washington, where he worked as an attorney at Miller and Chevalier and Bryan Cave.

John was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1990.

Sandra Day O’Connor likely would have stayed on the court longer, until she was in poor health like many justices who choose to retire, were it not for John’s disease, she has previously said.

“Most of them get ill and are really in bad shape, which I would’ve done at the end of the day myself, I suppose, except my husband was ill, and I needed to take action there,” she told the Associated Press in 2007.

By that time, John no longer recognized Sandra as his wife, the family said then.

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In 2008, Sandra spoke publicly to a special Senate committee on aging about the difficulties of caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease. She told them the country needed to get “deadly serious about this deadly disease.”

“I submit to you that until you have actually stared Alzheimer’s in the face, you cannot truly understand the deep sense of frustration, fear, helplessness and grief that accompany it,” she told the committee.

She retired in 2006 to search for a care facility for John in Phoenix. The decision mirrored the difficult calls many caregivers have to make every day, she told the committee.

“Alzheimer’s is a family disease,” she said. “It may directly attack only one member of the family, but every member of that family feels the effects. Every member loses something.”