Making Peace With a Lie
They say you can't reason with a person who has dementia, but if you're human, you'll try.
My family celebrated my grandmother’s 93rd birthday on January 8th but my dad thought we were celebrating Christmas.
“What a nice Christmas,” he’d say every now and then.
He had moments of knowing what day it was, like when my grandmother opened her presents or when we brought out her cake and sang “Happy Birthday” (the cake was vanilla with cannoli cream, and to her delight it came wrapped in a chocolate cage and a sheer green ribbon). But absent those clues, he’d go right back to thinking it was December 25th. Maybe we shouldn’t have left the tree up, I thought.
Then again, what did it matter? My grandma drank her tri-annual goblet of Bailey’s Irish Cream. My dad found an old monster mask in the basement and put it on to scare my brother. My dog scavenged a small hunk of pork off the floor. A good time was had by all.
At the end of the night, my dad had an idea. “We should order takeout for Grandma’s birthday, that way she doesn’t have to do all of this cooking again,” he said.
It’s fascinating how the brain works—how a person can remember that his mother’s birthday comes shortly after Christmas, but not that his mother’s birthday is that very day.
“That’s a great plan,” I told him. “She’ll love it.”
You’re not supposed to correct a person with dementia. It’ll only confuse or agitate them—and for what? It’s not like you’re going to convince them of your reality anyway. (“Enter their world,” the experts tell you, as if dementia care is an ayahuasca retreat in Costa Rica.)
For the longest time, I found that golden rule impossible to follow. Not for lack of patience or empathy. But because it felt like a betrayal, like I was leaving my father in the dark when my job was to keep him right where he belonged: here with me.
“Your ex didn’t get the house in your divorce,” I’d assure him. “You sold it and everything worked out okay.”
“Your friend isn’t ignoring you,” I’d promise. “You just hung out yesterday!”
I let a lot of things slide—I didn’t challenge him when he said he got his first Covid shot on the beach or when he claimed to have run miles a day back in Florida, where he imagined a happier, healthier life than the one he was now living in New York. But in instances where I thought the truth might bring him some comfort, I tried to set the record straight.
For a while, my corrective approach was manageable. He was early enough in the disease that I could repeat myself—gently, lovingly—until at least some of what I told him would stick (if only briefly).
But eventually, my attempts to bring him back from the edge stopped working altogether, and I could hear the wise words of my support-group leader echoing in my head. “You have to start meeting him where he is.”
A friend whose mother is in the early stages of dementia recently called to vent. He and his mom had just had a fight, and even though he regretted arguing with her, he was mostly angry. “This is how things have always been between us,” he said. “She doesn’t listen to me.”
I felt for him. I don’t argue with my dad because I never did (I didn't see him enough to argue with him). But I spent years trying to keep him in my reality for complicated reasons of my own: He was the man I put on a pedestal and I was the little girl who finally had him all to myself. I couldn’t let him go without a fight.
We come to caregiving on a learning curve. It takes time to understand the disease, master the healthcare system (as if one ever could), and set up routines that work (until they don’t). But it can sometimes feel like we’re expected to change our relationships—our long-standing dynamics—overnight. And that’s just not possible.
The best we can do is try.
I’m trying.
On my grandmother’s birthday, my dad thought it was Christmas. I was tempted to correct him, but I could see that he was happy—and I couldn’t think of a single good reason to pull him out of the world he was in. Not even my own broken heart.
Thanks for reading, Jade! And for your kind and thoughtful comment. You summed it up so well yourself.
I’ve been thinking, too, about how the struggle relates back to acceptance (or a lack thereof). The impulse to correct is a form of resistance, which is why it’s so exhausting and futile.
I love how you have examined this Patti. How the innate need to correct is more about the caregiver’s expectations, desires & pain, which can so easily be of no use to the person with dementia. The letting go of ‘right’ to settle within ‘right now’ — a beautiful observation.