A few years ago, I stood in a nursing home room and felt the air leave my lungs. I had walked in, smiled, and said, “Hi, Mom,” just like I had a thousand times before.
She looked up, paused, and politely asked: “Can I help you?”
They say when a loved one has dementia, you lose them twice—once when they forget who you are, and again when they leave this earth. I can tell you now: it isn’t just a saying. It’s a reality you live every single day.
At first, I didn’t handle it with wisdom. I tried to pull her back into my reality. “No, Mom, I’m your daughter,” I’d insist. She would just laugh and say, “Oh, I don’t remember.”
It took research, heartache, and a lot of prayer to realize I wasn’t talking to my mother anymore; I was talking to a disease. I was filled with regret. Regret that I had not gone to visit more often and learn more about the stories of her childhood. My regret turned into a new mission: To stop correcting and start connecting. Once I learned to meet her in her world, everything changed. If she thought I was her sister, I played the part. If she asked about her parents who had been gone for decades, we talked about them as if they were in the next room. We reminisced about childhood stories that were likely half-fiction by the time we were done, but it didn’t matter.
What mattered was that we were sharing a moment. Now that she’s passed, those are the memories I hold onto—the moments where, instead of fighting the fog, I decided to walk through it with her.
“Like the tide taking away the sand, dementia took bits of her memory every day. But by walking with her on that shore, I learned that even as the landscape changes, the ocean is still there.”
Stacy Perry
Founder of Lighthouses Lead