Dementia is, by almost any measure, a cruel disease. It erodes memory, steals identity, and turns loved ones into strangers. It can leave families grieving long before death arrives, navigating a relentless tide of loss, frustration, and heartbreak.
And yet.
For some, in the midst of the wreckage, dementia offers something unexpected – something almost sacred. A stripping away of ego. A dissolution of rigid defences. A softening into something more essential, more connected, more whole.
I have seen this firsthand.
A Man I Couldn’t Bear to See
My father was not a good man. He was a terrifying father – volatile, violent, and entirely unpredictable. He clothed us, fed us, took us on a family holiday each year, and put on a decent Christmas – where, if we were lucky, we didn’t get hit.
Beyond that, being raised by him was like living next to an unexploded bomb, never knowing when it would go off.
I left home as soon as I could, changed my name in a futile attempt to erase him from my psyche, and spent 16 years estranged from him. And then, slowly, painfully, and against every instinct I had, I found my way back to him.
Not For His Sake. For Mine.
Because the cost of hating him was too high.
Carrying that level of rage and resentment was like drinking poison every day and hoping he would die. It corroded me from the inside.
I didn’t want to condone him. I didn’t want to reconcile with him.
I just wanted to stop being held hostage by him – by what he had done, by the weight of my own history.
And so I did the work.
The work I now teach others.
The work of moving from War to Peace. Of seeing what lies beneath the armour, beneath the defences, beneath the brutality.
And then dementia came for him.
The Strange Irony of Dementia
By the time his second wife left him, the drinking was already heavy – his lifelong coping mechanism to deal with the trauma of his own childhood – and the dementia had already begun its slow, creeping destruction.
But it was when his children became his primary carers that I realised dementia had a sense of irony.
A Man I Had Never Met Before
And yet, dementia did something extraordinary.
It stole the man I knew and, in doing so, revealed the man he might have been.
His sharp wit remained intact – one of his many redeeming qualities, if I was willing to see them.
Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? When someone has hurt us deeply, we become blind to their good.
It’s not that it isn’t there – it’s that we cannot or will not see it.
Our minds categorise them as villainous, irredeemable. And for years, that’s how I saw him.
But dementia, in its strange and ruthless way, forced a reckoning.
It stripped away the father I had known and left behind someone else entirely.
Someone who, against all odds, I could finally meet.
The Man Dementia Gave Me
The man who had been hard, terrifying, and unreachable became someone entirely different.
A father who tells me he loves me and is proud of me.
A father who can listen – truly listen – as I speak of the trauma he caused.
A father who cries, who acknowledges the damage, who meets me with something that feels like real sorrow, real regret.
A father who can admit that his favourite film is The Bridges of Madison County.
What Dementia Took – and What It Gave Back
It is staggering, really, to watch a man shaped by violence and patriarchy – by an era that allowed and encouraged his worst instincts – become someone capable of softness.
I do not believe he was ever this man before. Not secretly, not beneath the rage.
I think he became this man only because dementia stripped away the parts of him that had hardened beyond repair.
Dementia often robs people of their dignity, their history, their ability to function.
But sometimes – just sometimes – it also takes away the shame, the self-protection, the walls people have built to survive.
It peels them back to something simpler. Something rawer.
The Truth About Who We Are
The truth is, both men existed. The father I had, and the father I have now.
And what I know – what I hold onto – is that collapsing his worst actions with his entire being serves nothing.
He did horrendous things. And yet, at his core, beneath the wreckage, beneath the conditioning, beneath the layers of damage that shaped him long before he shaped me, he is human.
As we all are.
This is Not Forgiveness. This is Freedom.
I never call him when I’m angry. Not because my anger isn’t justified – it is – but because yelling at the last vestige of him won’t heal me.
I do call him when I’m sad. And, miraculously, I allow him to comfort me.
“It’s okay, Dad,” I say. “You won’t remember this conversation in 15 minutes.”
He assures me, with the deep sincerity of a man whose soul has just been seen, that he absolutely will.
That this moment has meant something. That we have met, finally, in a place beyond all of it.
And then I call him 15 minutes later.
And he has no idea we even spoke.
Perhaps That Should Be Heartbreaking.
But somehow, it isn’t.
Because every time we meet, it is for the first time.
Every conversation is new.
Every expression of love, every apology, every moment of warmth is fresh and untainted.
I do not have to remind him of all the times he was cruel.
I do not have to wait for him to unlearn a lifetime of conditioning.
He does not have to remember our healing for it to be real.
And so, in this strange, unexpected way, dementia has given me something I never thought I would have.
A father who loves me.
Even if he forgets.
I won’t.
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