My father has told people my mother’s dementia is an act for six years. He has said it to relatives, neighbors, and once to a social worker who came to assess her condition. He says she has always been theatrical and that she knows exactly what she is doing. I have spent years caring for her and watching things happen that no amount of pretending could explain. Nobody contradicts him because he has been her husband for sixty-one years, and somehow that history makes his version carry more weight than what the rest of us can see.
I have done her care since 2019. I know which mornings she remembers her own name and which mornings she asks where she is. I know she can sometimes hold a conversation perfectly and then forget the entire conversation twenty minutes later. My father calls those moments proof that she is pretending. I used to argue with him, but eventually I realized that arguing only made him more determined to prove himself right. So I kept doing what needed to be done and let him tell himself whatever made it easier for him.
At her eighty-fifth birthday in March, he said it again in front of the aide who bathes her. He laughed and said she had everyone fooled, then told the aide that his wife had been acting like this for years. The aide put down the towel and asked him how long he’d been caring for her alone. He said he hadn’t, because I handled most of it. The aide looked at him and said, “Then you don’t get to call it an act just because you haven’t been the one watching what happens when nobody is looking.”
My father became angry and said the aide didn’t know our family. She calmly told him she didn’t need to, because she had watched my mother forget the same instructions, repeat the same questions, and become frightened in the same familiar room. Then she told him that pretending for six years would require an extraordinary performance from a woman who couldn’t remember what she’d been told five minutes earlier. My father went quiet, and my mother looked at him and asked who he was. He froze because she had forgotten his name for the first time while he was standing right there. I took her hand, and the aide quietly said, “That’s not an act, sir. That’s the disease you’ve been refusing to see.”
