What my father’s Alzheimer’s taught me

When I tell friends, ‘You never hear people talking about the upside of Alzheimer’s’, they look at me like I’ve said something about Hitler being nice to animals. In general, a mention of dementia will ruin any conversation. People freeze up at the thought. It’s true that having a relative with dementia is hard and the bad far outweighs the good, but that is no reason to ignore the positives completely. In fact, the tiny benefits can help you deal with all the downsides. 

I’ve had a lot of time to look for the positives. Growing up, my grandparents had Alzheimer’s so I was aware of the condition, but I hadn’t thought that it could happen to my parents. Then Mum was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2012 and Dad with both Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia in 2016. Sadly, my parents didn’t make it through the pandemic. Now, looking back, I realise that the best relationship I ever had with my father was when he had dementia. 

According to the Alzheimer’s Society, one of the symptoms to look for in the early stages of dementia is a change of mood. Our inner pessimist assumes that will make our loved ones lash out at us in anger or cry with sadness, and that does happen for many people. My father, however, changed from the severe and withdrawn man I knew growing up and became happier than I had ever seen him. 

He was a joy to be around. He even started pulling pranks. When the doctors would test his cognitive abilities by asking him if he knew who I was he’d say ‘I’ve never met him before in my life’, before turning to me and winking – a high-stakes prank when you’re in a care home. 

There is a loss of inhibition that comes with the condition. In Dad’s case, this was a good thing. He went from being a quiet man who didn’t have many passions in life to someone who was up and dancing if music came on the TV. He became the life and soul of the party. He wasn’t dancing like there’s no one watching, he was dancing like he didn’t care who could see him.  

We’re a working-class family in the Midlands, so when I was growing up my father was mainly at the factory. He was either working overtime or was taking the better paid night shifts. He wasn’t around a lot. As northern men, we probably repressed any outward sign of emotion, but Alzheimer’s meant he lost that filter. When he saw me walk in to visit him in the care home he would jump out of his seat with tears of joy in his eyes shouting: ‘Steve!’ He didn’t do that before. 

Our previous relationship was further complicated by the fact that Dad probably imagined his son would become a man he could talk to about sport over a few pints. When his only son turned out to be a teetotal sci-fi nerd with no interest in football, we didn’t have much to bond over. Most of our conversations before his diagnosis were about which A-roads I’d recently used. 

A large life event such as a parent getting dementia is enough to make you forgive and forget past silly resentments that build up in a family. That can bring you closer together. It reset our relationship. With a clean slate, no one failed to meet an expectation or caused upset. Every visit with Dad became a time when we were happy to be there. We’d visit the parks and local pubs and being there was enough. It’s the most honest and authentic we’d ever been. 

I’d never known my father to swear. I’m sure he did but he chose not to in front of his kids. The forgetfulness of Alzheimer’s meant he forgot his self-imposed rule and we had such fun sitting around laughing because of the language he’d use. He would ask the carers if they had any medicine ‘for coughs’. We were like teenage boys giggling away.  

It’s hard to know if the disease changed my father or if the bond may have always been there, masked by baggage that got in the way, and was finally allowed to rise to the surface when the dementia simplified things. It doesn’t really matter either way. All I know is he became a joyous person; a pleasure to spend time with.