The past few weeks have reminded me that grief and love can sit in the same chair.
It started on a Tuesday.
No particular reason. No dramatic incident. No hallucination worse than the ones before it. Just a Tuesday — pale and ordinary — when I sat down at the kitchen table after Mom had finally fallen asleep, and I couldn’t move.
Not because I was tired, though I was.
Not because I was sad, though I was that too.
I couldn’t move because I didn’t know what I was feeling. There were too many things at once. Grief. Tenderness. Frustration. A strange, hollow gratitude for the quiet. The tail end of a laugh we’d shared an hour earlier over something she’d said — something that made no sense and was somehow still funny. And underneath all of it, that low, steady ache that doesn’t really have a name. The ache of losing someone who is still here.
I sat at that table for a long time.
If you are caregiving for someone with dementia, I believe you know exactly what that Tuesday felt like.
The Myth of the Single Feeling
Somewhere along the way, we learned to expect feelings to come one at a time. Sadness arrives, we process it, it leaves. Joy comes, we enjoy it, it fades. That is the tidy version of emotional life — the version that fits neatly into a sentence.
Dementia caregiving does not work that way.
In this journey, the feelings don’t take turns. They pile in together, uninvited, all at once, through the same door. Grief and love are inseparable. Exhaustion and devotion share the same bed. You can feel fury at a disease and total tenderness toward the person it has taken — in the space of a single breath.
And no one warns you about that. Not really.
The pamphlets don’t say: You will feel seventeen things simultaneously and none of them will make sense together. The well-meaning friends who have not done this don’t say: You will laugh at something heartbreaking and cry at something mundane and spend entire evenings not knowing whether you are okay or completely shattered. The books about caregiving outline the stages of grief as if they arrive in sequence, as if you’ll move through them in order like chapters.
But here, in the actual rooms where caregiving happens — in the kitchens and bedrooms and hallways where we coax another pill down with applesauce, or redirect a fear about an invisible thief, or hold a hand that no longer knows whose hand we are — the feelings don’t follow a schedule.
They come all at once. Every time.
What I Have Learned to Call This
I’ve stopped trying to name the individual emotions and started recognizing the whole thing as a single experience that caregiving makes uniquely possible.
It is the experience of loving someone through their disappearance.
That is what this is.
Not loss, because she is still here. Not grief, because grief implies an ending, and we are still very much in the middle. Not happiness, because happiness is too simple a word for what I feel when she smiles at something that only exists in her world but is clearly beautiful to her.
It is something older and harder and more complicated than any one word.
It is sitting with a person who is present in body but elsewhere in mind, and deciding, again and again, that you will stay. That you will keep showing up for the version of her that is still available to you, even as the other versions — the mother who remembered your birthday, the woman who made her own decisions, the person who knew your face — recede like watercolors left in the rain.
It is carrying her memories because she can no longer carry them herself.
That is both an honor and a weight I cannot fully describe.
The Grief That Lives Beside the Living
People talk about anticipatory grief — the mourning of someone who hasn’t died yet — as if it is a preparation for what is coming.
I don’t experience it that way.
For me, the grief is not anticipatory. It is present-tense. Active. Ongoing. I grieve her daily, in small, specific ways, for very specific things.
I grieve the conversations we used to have — the long ones, about ordinary things, that required no translation between her world and mine.
I grieve the way she used to say my name. Not just the sound of it, but the recognition behind it. The way a name becomes something entirely different when spoken by someone who truly knows who you are.
I grieve the plans we made before any of this. The quiet, unspoken understanding between a parent and child that there will be more time. That there are things still to be said, questions still to be asked, mornings still to be shared.
I grieve a living person. Every day. And then I go back in and take care of her.
This is the part that is hardest to explain to people who have not been here. They hear the word grief and assume a funeral. But this grief has no date. It arrives every morning and then asks you to make breakfast.
What I want you to know — if you are reading this in the middle of your own version of this — is that grieving someone who is still beside you is not strange. It is not a sign that you have given up. It does not mean you love them less. It is one of the most demanding forms of love that exists: to mourn and to keep showing up. To grieve and to still choose tenderness.
The Feelings That Surprise You
Nobody warns you about the unexpected ones.
The ones that arrive sideways, that you weren’t expecting, that make you feel confused or guilty for feeling them at all.
The strange lightness after a hard moment passes. When she finally sleeps after an hour of agitation, when the fear in her eyes is replaced by calm, when the restlessness settles — there is a relief so deep it almost feels like joy. And then you feel guilty for the relief, because relief implies you wanted the difficulty to end, and wanting difficulty to end when you love someone feels like a betrayal.
It is not a betrayal. It is human.
The unexpected humor. She said something last month — in absolute seriousness, in the middle of a conversation about an invisible woman who lives in our walls — that was so perfectly, accidentally funny that I laughed until I had to leave the room. And then stood in the hallway, laughing and crying at the same time, not entirely sure which was which.
Humor in this place is not disrespect. It is survival. It is the small mercies that make the hard things bearable.
The tenderness that catches you off guard. You brace for the hard moments. You prepare for the fear and the confusion and the repetition. What you don’t prepare for is the moment she reaches out and touches your face, not because she knows who you are, but because you are there, and you are kind, and something in her still responds to kindness. Those moments are almost harder than the difficult ones. Because they remind you that the person is still inside there, somewhere. Still capable of gentleness. Still reaching.
Those moments carry me forward more than anything else.
The Question That Haunts Every Caregiver
Am I doing this right?
I hear it in myself. I see it in the comments people leave here, in the messages, in the stories shared by caregivers who are far braver than they believe themselves to be.
Am I doing enough. Am I being patient enough. Did I handle that correctly. Should I have said something different. Was I too soft or too firm or too distracted or too hovering.
Let me offer you what I have slowly, painfully learned:
There is no single right way to do this.
There is only love, trying its best under conditions it was not designed for.
The love that brings you back after a hard moment. The love that learns to redirect instead of correct, to enter her world instead of demanding she return to yours. The love that adapts constantly — because the person you are caring for is changing constantly, and love that doesn’t adapt will break.
A love that bends without breaking is not a lesser love. It is the most demanding kind.
What I See When I Read Your Stories
Since I started writing about this journey, the responses have changed everything.
You write to me about your mothers who are missing even though they are still in the room. Your fathers who greet midnight as morning, confused and frightened in the dark. You describe the strange mathematics of this caregiving life — how every small victory, like coaxing one more sip of water, carries a weight entirely disproportionate to its size, because you understand what it cost and what it means.
You write about guilt. About the days you weren’t your best self. About the moments you wish you could take back, and the weight of carrying them.
Every single story I read, underneath all of it, is a love story.
Not the simple, uncomplicated kind. Not the kind that photographs well or fits into a greeting card. But the real kind — the kind forged in difficulty, shaped by loss, refined by days that asked more than any person should be asked to give.
A love that shows up even on the days it has nothing left to give.
A love that remembers, on behalf of someone who can no longer hold the memories.
A love that celebrates the tiniest victories, because in this life, they are sometimes the only ones we get.
The Victories Worth Celebrating
I want to name them, specifically, because they deserve to be named.
The morning she recognized my voice, even if she couldn’t find my name.
The afternoon she sang every word of an old song — perfectly, completely, without hesitation — when speaking in sentences had become difficult.
The evening she laughed at something on television and for a few minutes was simply a person watching television and laughing, unburdened.
The moment she reached for my hand.
The moment she ate the whole bowl of soup.
The morning the fear didn’t come.
These are small things. I know they are small. But I have learned that in caregiving, small is not the opposite of significant. Small, in this world, is everything. Small is the moment you hold onto. Small is the reason you get up tomorrow.
We celebrate the small things here. Without apology.
On the Days You Feel Worn Thin
This is for the Tuesday nights. For the kitchen-table moments when you’ve run out of everything and you’re not sure how you’re going to find more of it by morning.
You are not failing. You are depleted.
Those are not the same thing.
Depleted means you have been pouring from yourself — steadily, consistently, for a long time — and the reserve is low. It does not mean the love is gone. It does not mean you have reached your permanent limit. It means you are human, and humans have a finite capacity for sustained difficulty, and you have been at this a long time.
What you need is not to do more. What you need is to be witnessed.
To have someone say: what you are doing is hard, and you are doing it anyway, and that matters.
So let me say it plainly:
What you are doing is hard. You are doing it anyway. That matters more than I can say.
A Gentle Invitation
The past few weeks have reminded me how many of us are carrying the same weight in different rooms, in different countries, in different languages — all asking the same questions, all loving through the same impossible circumstances.
What you carry is real. What you feel is valid. Every complicated, contradictory, difficult-to-name thing you feel is part of this, and it belongs here.
So I want to open this space, gently.
What is one moment from your caregiving path that stays with you?
Maybe it was a moment that broke you open. Maybe it brought a light you weren’t expecting. Maybe it confused you, or quietly amazed you, or left you standing in a hallway not knowing whether to laugh or cry.
Maybe it was a Tuesday at a kitchen table.
Share it here if you are willing. Your words might reach someone who is sitting exactly where you sat, feeling exactly what you felt, wondering if anyone else has ever understood.
Someone does. Someone always does.
We are not alone in this. Not for a single Tuesday of it.
Cristian cares for his mother with Parkinson’s disease and dementia in Romania. Every story shared here is part of a larger journey documented in Whispers From the Attic. If this reached you today, it was meant to.
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Have you tried validation therapy? What happened when you stopped correcting and started validating? Share your experience in the comments.
Resources if you need them:
- Alzheimer’s Association 24/7 Helpline: 800-272-3900
- Caregiver Action Network: 855-227-3640
- Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741
Cristian cares for his mother with Stage 4 Parkinson’s disease and dementia in Romania. The pile of rugs beside her bed is smaller now, but still there—a reminder that sometimes surrender is the bravest form of love. Follow their journey at HopesForMom.com.
