Stories About My Father

How dementia has helped me deconstruct my complicated relationship with my dad.

Me with my dad at Parrot World in the 70s.

Happy Father’s Day weekend, my friends.

I know for many of us, holidays like Father’s Day can be rough. Some of us are missing fathers who have passed. Some of us are unable to be with our fathers to celebrate because of distance or circumstance. Others have fraught relationships with our fathers that don’t neatly fit within the bounds of a Hallmark card.

I fall firmly in that latter camp.

My father was (is?) a mercurial man — prone to verbal outbursts, emotionally unavailable, misogynistic and conservative. A bully. I’ve maintained a consistent but distantly relationship with him my whole adult life, which persists even now that he’s 80-years-old and lives in memory care due to his advancing dementia.

Every time I return to Florida to visit him though, I get the gift of a new realization. Dementia has peeled back the layers on his angry persona and revealed the scared little boy who always lived underneath. He’s sweeter, vulnerable, anxious now. It’s easier to feel empathy for him.

Getting to know my dad anew as he reveals himself in his twilight years has been a strange gift, and one I’ve written about at length.