Demented Parents
My friend’s mother called her by her sister’s name on a Thursday in March. It wasn’t the first time, but it was the first time my friend went to the bathroom afterwards and sat on the floor for twenty minutes. She didn’t cry. She said she just needed to sit somewhere small.
That’s what nobody tells you about having a parent with dementia. It’s not one big moment of loss. It’s hundreds of small ones. A name forgotten. A story told for the ninth time that afternoon. The moment they look at you and you can see them searching — actually searching — for who you are. And you’re standing there, being erased in real time, expected to smile and say “it’s me, Mum. It’s me.”
If you’re caring for a parent with dementia, you already know this. You probably know it in your body — that specific tiredness that sleep doesn’t fix. The kind where you’re grieving someone who’s still sitting right there, eating toast, asking what day it is for the third time. What demented parents put their families through is mourning in slow motion and nobody hands you a manual for that.
Here’s something that helped me when I started reading about it. People have been losing their parents slowly for as long as there have been parents. Dementia has a modern name but the experience — watching someone you love disappear while their body stays — that’s ancient. Poets and philosophers have been sitting with the grief of demented parents for centuries. Some of them found words for it that are better than anything I’ve seen in a caregiver’s handbook.
You’re not the first to carry this
Voices Across Time
A Zen master who taught people how to sit with suffering they couldn’t fix. A Roman philosopher who understood that grief comes in installments. A Lebanese poet who saw what happens when parent and child switch roles. And a Chinese sage who watched everything change and decided resistance was the real enemy. Four voices. None of them had a cure. All of them had something honest to say.
“To suffer and not know why you are suffering is a terrible burden.”
Thich Nhat Hanh — Vietnamese Zen master, 1926–2022
No Mud, No Lotus
Thich Nhat Hanh was a Buddhist monk who got exiled from his own country for thirty-nine years. He knew something about loss that doesn’t resolve. His whole teaching was built around this deceptively simple idea: be present with what’s actually happening. Not what you wish was happening. Not what used to happen. What’s happening right now, in this room, with this person.
When you’re a dementia caregiver sitting next to a parent who doesn’t recognise you, “being present” sounds like the most useless advice imaginable. I thought so too. But then someone pointed out that presence doesn’t mean acceptance. It means you stop fighting the gap between who they were and who they are right now. You just — sit in the room with them. That’s it. Some days that’s the entire accomplishment, and Thich Nhat Hanh would have said that’s enough.
“We suffer more in imagination than in reality.”
Seneca — Letters to Lucilius
Seneca was the kind of guy who’d lose his political position, get exiled to a rock in the Mediterranean, and then write a letter to his mother telling her not to worry. Maddening, probably. But also — the man understood loss that comes gradually. Not the dramatic, someone-died kind. The slow kind. The “something is a little worse than yesterday and you can’t quite prove it” kind.
That line about suffering more in imagination than reality — it sounds dismissive until you apply it to dementia caregiving specifically. Because half the pain of caring for a demented parent isn’t what’s happening today. It’s imagining next month. Next year. The version of them you’ll be visiting in eighteen months. Seneca’s point wasn’t “stop worrying.” His point was that the anticipation is its own separate wound, and you’re allowed to put it down for an hour.
“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.”
Khalil Gibran — The Prophet
Gibran wrote “your children are not your children” as part of a longer piece about parenthood, and it’s beautiful and also, honestly, a bit annoying in its certainty. But something shifts when you read it from the other direction — when you’re the child, and your parent is disappearing, and the roles have quietly reversed without anyone signing a form.
My friend — the one with the bathroom floor — said the strangest part of having a parent with dementia wasn’t the forgetting. It was becoming the parent. Making the decisions. Choosing the food, the schedule, the level of truth. Gibran’s words hit differently when you’re the one spooning soup into someone who used to tie your shoelaces. The love doesn’t need memory to survive. But it does need a new shape. And finding that shape is exhausting in ways nobody warns you about.
Lao Tzu’s line about not resisting change feels, on first read, like it was written by someone who never had to watch their mother forget how to use a kettle. I get it. “Don’t resist” — really? But Lao Tzu wasn’t talking about giving up. He was talking about the difference between carrying something and dragging it.
A parent with dementia changes every week sometimes. The person you visit on Tuesday isn’t quite the person you visited last Tuesday. You can spend all your energy fighting that — insisting on the version you remember, correcting them, getting frustrated when they ask the same question again — or you can meet them where they are today. Not because it’s fine. It’s not fine. But because resistance takes energy you don’t have, and Lao Tzu, sitting under his tree twenty-five centuries ago, seems to have known that.
“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow.”
Lao Tzu — Chinese philosopher, 6th century BC
Tao Te Ching
What connects them all
What They All Understood
What I notice about these four — Thich Nhat Hanh, Seneca, Gibran, Lao Tzu — is that none of them offer a fix. There’s no “five steps to acceptance.” No light at the end of anything. What they offer instead is company. The recognition that this kind of grief — slow, formless, ongoing — has been part of being human for a very long time. You’re not failing because it’s hard. It’s hard because you love someone whose reality is no longer the same as yours.
Dealing with a demented parent doesn’t have a resolution. It has moments. Good ones and brutal ones, sometimes in the same afternoon. What these voices offer to families of demented parents, each in their own way, is that the moments are the point. Not the outcome. Not the prognosis. Demented parents can still surprise you. The five minutes where your mum laughs at something and it sounds exactly like it always did. That’s not nothing. That’s everything.
Before you go
A Moment for You
If you’re in it right now — the hospital visits, the repeated conversations, the guilt of wanting an hour to yourself — you don’t need to perform gratitude or find a silver lining. Some days the only win is that you showed up. A Zen master, a Roman senator, a poet and a sage all agree on this much: showing up, when everything in you wants to hide, is not a small thing.
If any of this landed and you want a quiet place to think it through — InnerCalm+ is there. No advice. Just space.
This content is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you’re struggling with mental health issues, please consult a qualified healthcare provider.
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