Just want to share some life stuff. We're in the throws of dealing with the transition of my mother in law to assisted living and soon, memory care for increasingly severe dementia.

It’s a strange kind of grief, watching someone disappear in pieces. They’re right there, sitting across the room, smiling like they know a secret—but the secret is that they don’t know you, or at least not all of you. Not anymore.

Dementia doesn’t announce itself. It creeps in like a draft under the door, quiet and cold, until one day you’re sitting at a table, realizing the person you love is somewhere you can’t follow. You start keeping a mental ledger: what they still know, what they don’t, the things they’re slipping away from and the things they’re holding on to like anchors. Sometimes those anchors are strange—songs they hum but can’t name, a recipe they can’t cook but recite like scripture, the name of the neighbor’s dog from 30 years ago.

You grieve the loss of who they were, but you don’t get to bury it. Instead, you carry it alongside them, learning to meet them where they are instead of where you wish they could be. That’s the cruel trick of it: your job becomes showing up for the present, even when it’s fractured, even when it hurts.

There’s humor in it too, if you’re brave enough to look for it. The kind that sneaks up on you in the middle of the heartbreak. Like when your mom, who doesn’t know your name, lights up because you brought her a strawberry milkshake. Or when she calls you "handsome," and you’re not sure if she means it in the parental way or because she’s decided you’re a charming stranger. It’s awkward and bittersweet and oddly wonderful.

You also learn patience—not in the performative way people talk about it at yoga retreats, but real, bone-deep patience. The kind that lets you answer the same question four times in a row, because for them, every time is the first. The kind that makes you realize time is elastic, that you don’t own it, that moments of lucidity are gifts, not promises.

It’s easy to feel small in the face of it. Helpless. But you’re not. You’re there, and that matters. You become their map, their compass, their steady hand when the world tilts. And sometimes you’ll get it wrong, because there’s no guidebook for this, no manual. Just trial and error and a lot of deep breaths.

The thing is, they’re still in there, even if they’re scattered like pages torn from a book. And if you listen—really listen—you can still hear their story. It’s just shorter now, the sentences fragmented, the meaning left for you to stitch together.

But it’s still them. And you? You’re still you. You love them, not because it’s easy, but because it’s what you do. Because love doesn’t depend on memory. It’s bigger than that. It stays when the rest fades. It anchors us, even when everything else drifts away.