When I was growing up, my parents gave my life stability. They made me feel safe and secure. Life was orderly and very predictable. I relied on their strength and trusted in their wisdom. It was almost as if I had a protective force field around me that they created, and nothing could penetrate to hurt me. There was comfort in living that way.

Nothing prepared me for the call that I received years later. My mother’s voice on the other end of the phone, “I think I’m in trouble.” The woman who had protected me for fifty years sounded unsure of herself and asked for my help, maybe even my protection. 

As the story unfolded, my mother explained that she was calling from the hospital. My father had been taken there days before, unbeknownst to the entire family. In trying to protect her children and be strong herself, my mother lied. She led the doctors to believe that she and my father had no family. I thought at that moment it sounded bizarre, but later I understood her need to keep her children from having to know the unpleasantness of what she thought would be a brief illness. She took care of it just like many times before, and we would hear about the details after the fact. That was how my mother kept the burden from her children. She was our protective force field. 

I did not realize, or maybe I just didn’t want to admit it, that my mother was having trouble with her memory. My father had become incapacitated by his recent illness. She was struggling with the simplest tasks, and the professionals at the hospital noticed her confusion. They wanted to be sure she was getting the help that she needed, and they asked her about her family, which she denied having. At that point, the doctors were bound by ethics to make an Adult Protective report. My mother knew the information would find its way to me because I work for Adult Protective. She heard me talk about my job enough to know that this call could have serious consequences, and she was scared. 

This was the day that dementia became a major part of my life. I had to come to terms with reality. The predictable, stable, ordered world that I had always known was gone. In its place was an unknown future. Dementia was the exact opposite of what I always knew. It brought confusion, insecurity, instability, and change to our life. I did just what my mother would have done for any of her children by protecting her with everything in me. 

I mourned the loss of our family as I knew it. Our lives changed overnight, and I wondered how I missed the signs that now seemed to be staring right at me. The stories that she would repeat over and over. I chalked those up to personality quirks. Sticky notes left around the house, including the one on the laundry soap with instructions on how to dispense it and in what amount. I laughed it off, thinking she was micromanaging my father. Two years before, she had asked me to bring over the entire Christmas dinner. At the agreed-upon time, I showed up with the hot meal, and she had my brother’s family there, feeding them cold sandwiches because she couldn’t remember having asked me to prepare a meal.

My mother’s friends told me that her personality had changed, and they had noticed her confusion. No one mentioned it before now. My parents withdrew from the activities they loved and had been involved in for years. I never realized it was all a sign of something deeper. It should have gotten my attention but didn’t. 

In the years that followed, my mother forgot me. She was content living moment to moment with no recollection of her past. Faces might have been familiar, but she could never place them or remember names. If she had a moment where there was a glimmer, I was happy to share it with her, and then quickly, it would go away, and I was a stranger again. I would sit next to her, and she would ask about the weather outside. We would talk about it for the seconds that her attention span would allow. She then would go quiet and fuss with a napkin or some such thing. I never knew what her thoughts were. She would hum to herself, smile, or shake her head to agree to a question not asked. Then, just like that, she would ask about the weather, and we would talk about it all over again. 

Our roles had changed. I had to learn to take care of my parents. What I realized was that they needed stability and predictability. They relied on my strength and wisdom. My parents were vulnerable in their last years and needed me to put that imaginary force field around our family and give them the best care I could.