Part 2: When Dementia Creeps In
Updated: 3 days ago
Welcome to Part 2 of my four-part series on caring for aging parents. If you missed the beginning, you can catch up on Part 1: The Expectations vs. Our Reality.
Dementia is a disease that slowly creeps up on you. We all experience “senior moments” or “brain fog,” which makes the gradual decline in memory easy to overlook or dismiss in the early stages. Because I didn’t live with my dad or talk to him every day, it was even harder to recognize the warning signs.
My dad traveling abroad—fit, active, and exploring the world on his own terms.
Looking back now, with hindsight, I can see those early moments clearly.
It started with phone calls asking me to come over to discuss important matters. We’d set a date, but when we met, we’d never get around to talking about why he originally wanted to see me. At the time, I didn’t think much of it—until it happened several more times. Then came the appointments. He would arrive two or three hours late to the dentist or to meet my mom because he got lost on the way. It was becoming clear that this was more than simple forgetfulness.
My dad had always traveled every summer to attend linguistics conferences, with one of his last trips taking him to Spain. Mid-way through that trip, my mom called me in a panic: my dad was missing. His colleagues said he wasn’t in his hotel room and no one could locate him. When they finally found him after he had been missing overnight, his bag had been stolen and his clothes were soiled. It wasn’t until four months later that I connected with his travel agent, who was able to fill in the painful details of what had actually occurred during that trip.
Today, after nearly two years of navigating this disease, I feel like I’ve become an unintentional dementia expert. But at that time, I had no idea what was happening. It felt as though he would fall in and out of a trance—one moment completely alert, sharp, and himself, and the next, lost and disoriented. Because my dad had always possessed a strong temper, it was easy to mistake his growing agitation as just his personality. But after the incident in Spain, I knew a visit to the doctor for an official diagnosis was necessary.
The day of that appointment changed everything, though not in the way we expected.
I arrived early at his place to pick him up, but he wasn’t there. His bag and keys were sitting inside, but there was no sign of Dad. Thinking he had gone for one of his usual five-to-ten-mile walks and simply lost track of time, I drove around the neighborhood searching for him. An hour past his appointment time, my phone rang. It was the emergency room at the local hospital—my dad had been admitted at 7:00 AM.
We slowly pieced together what happened. The night before, he went outside to throw out the trash and accidentally locked himself out. During that moment, he fell down a flight of stairs. Realizing his keys were locked inside, he walked to the security guard to call my mom, who was asleep in her own home (they lived separately). Around 11:00 PM, he decided to walk to her house—a path he had walked and driven dozens of times before. But likely suffering a concussion from the fall, dementia took over on the walk. He never made it to my mom’s house. The following morning, someone eventually noticed him on the street and called 911, and an ambulance brought him to the hospital.
That day, against my dad’s wishes, my brother and I made the painful decision that our dad could no longer live safely on his own and needed to move into assisted living. Though my brother and I made that choice together, the daily reality and heavy weight of the caregiving duties inevitably fell to me.
Five days later, luckily there was space, and my dad had his initial move-in. He didn't go willingly. He had noticeably lost twenty pounds, routinely forgetting meal times and likely forgetting how to cook for himself. Because he refused to accept that this was a permanent move, we only took his bed and loveseat sofa. He wouldn't allow us to take more, even refusing a change of clothes, insisting he would just come back home whenever he needed to change. In the end, he made it clear that he only agreed to go strictly to "fatten up," holding onto his own private intention to go back and forth between both homes.
Dementia rarely arrives all at once; it sneaks up through subtle pattern changes, quiet memory slips, and moments we easily explain away. Moving my dad into assisted living was only the first of many heartbreaking decisions we had to make, but it marked the true beginning of my caregiving reality.
Stay tuned for Part 3, where I share what happened next as our family navigated this new chapter.
Blessings, Michelle
← Previous: Part 1: The Expectations | Next: Part 3: The Short-Lived Transition →
