But Dad Seems Fine to Me!

I recently spoke with the child of a client who said her mother still has days when she seems “completely normal—no serious memory deficits, no confusion, no agitation and, she recognized me and my children.

One might say that I’m learning about dementia from the inside out.  I would say that the unkindest part of dementia is its inconsistency. Some days, still, I will speak with my father on the phone, hang up the phone and turn to my partner. He knows that look, one of pleasant bewilderment. What follows is a comment such as this: “Wow. Dad sounded great tonight!  He was his old self! He remembered that we visited him last week, thanked us for the jacket with the enormous white “Y” on it that we gave him for his birthday last week, gave me an update on his sister in Idaho and carried on a conversation as though everything is just fine!”

I know this can happen. In fact, I’ve had conversations about this very phenomenon many times with colleagues who remind me that this is just another cruel aspect of dementia. What’s awful is that I’m fooled every time. I want so badly to believe that things are just OK that I’m ready to believe things are all back to normal. The universe has somehow reverted to pre-Alzheimer’s diagnosis day and, well, we have our dad back.

These moments of clarity are brief, sadly. It isn’t long before I have a conversation with my sister or mother. A few statements about what’s actually going on throws me back to the unfortunate reality: Dad’s going to have good days and bad days. But over time, it’s only going to get worse.

There is something about the mind that wants so badly to sneak quietly into the rooms of denial. It’s so seductive to just believe that we all had it wrong—the neurologist, the neurpsychologist, the family physician—wrong, wrong, wrong.

I would suggest that it is this very built-in “forgetter” that allows us to survive the darker, more traumatic moments of our life. We are quick to forget the pain, sorrow, loss and grief. In fact, many of us have become unusually adept at the forgetting process. Who wouldn’t want to believe the fantasy and imagine that we can have the past back.

I went back to a blog called “Dementia Blues.” The last line assured me that extended moments of clarity, of normal-seeming behavior will simply “come and go.” From "Dementia Blues."

Rather than let myself feel the despair, I just remind myself, and ask those around me to do the same, to enjoy the moments we have when dad seems to have miraculously reverted to his former self but to not allow ourselves to become so thrilled that we have to relive the surprise and deep sorrow of the reality: It comes and goes.