What Dementia Taught Me About Living Through a Callous Time

J ust as President Joe Biden was showing signs of cognitive decline so conspicuous that he was compelled to drop out of the presidential race in 2024, my own father’s dementia was worsening. He lived with us, and yet he lived in another reality entirely. One where he no longer understood that the food on his plate was his, and the food on my daughter’s was hers. One where he grew agitated when we wouldn’t let him walk in a rainstorm. One where he no longer knew my name. Being in the bizarre world of his deteriorating mind was not unlike reading the headlines each day as the months, and then years, went on. My once sweet and Buddhist dad’s abandonment of norms, his misplaced anger, his seemingly selfish relentlessness, were a product of his disease — the nerve cells in his brain were no longer communicating properly. His context for just about everything fell away. Courtney and her father at Thanksgiving. Credit: John Cary The country’s deterioration was different, a deliberate poisoning more than an organic disease, but the parallels were there. It felt pathological how callous and hard our country had become. But there was also something happening underneath my dad’s deterioration. My whole family was learning to collectively care for him — taking him on drives and scream-singing Tom Petty when he would get sundowners (a medical term for late-day confusion in dementia patients), reading Pema Chödrön aloud to him in the backyard, letting him have our ice cream cones when he would reach for them.  And our neighbors were in on the tenderness. They’d call when he wandered too far or help him back home when they found him sitting in their unlocked cars. In our local park, when my dad started helping himself to a plate of sandwiches meticulously arranged on a picnic table, the Japanese family they belonged to welcomed this unkempt, white, six-foot-two stranger to their outing as if he were a long lost relative. Likewise, there has been something happening underneath the deterioration of our country. While the headlines reveal the truth of the matter — data centers bulldozing their way into rural communities, masked federal agents yanking delivery workers off their bikes, industry lobbyists buying legislation that allows them to poison our water and air — there are also young people planting community gardens to tackle gun violence in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; caregivers riding their kids to school in bike buses in Montclair, New Jersey; and folks of all ages gathering for the Black Joy Parade in Oakland, California. While some national figures are trying to flood the zone with so much chaos that we can’t keep up, other Americans are working hard to bring running water and indoor plumbing to those who still don’t have it. Weighed down by negative news? Enter your email below to receive our smart, uplifting newsletters. Or click here to choose exactly which ones you want [contact-form-7] We’re witnessing a reweaving of local fabric, and a renewed curiosity in one another. Parents watching the resurgence of blatant misogyny are intentionally raising boys who embrace their tender feelings and connections. Famously red Texas has had more data center protests than any other state , so  perhaps there is more possibility for labor and climate collaboration than we have understood. Leaders in a wide range of faiths weathered the bitter cold of Minneapolis to join local solidarity protests against ICE raids after the tragic death of Renée Good. It seems we are curious again about what role faith might play in our ethical lives together, how we can build a culture of mutual aid in our very unequal communities, and even how we might better understand the economic pain of those who have been abandoned and stereotyped by mainstream media and the political elite. If the last decade or two has been about expanding our horizons, it feels like this one is becoming about humbly narrowing the aperture on our lives and trying to get right with our neighbors, housed and unhoused alike. At a time when A.I. threatens to unravel us in so many ways, economist E.F. Schumacher’s wisdom from his 1973 book Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered feels worth reviving: “I have no doubt that it is possible to give a new direction to technological development, a direction that shall lead it back to the real needs of man, and that also means: To the actual size of man. Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful.” In the end, this is what saved my family as we took care of my dad; the small moments in the midst of the chaos where we could register his essence intact, where we could devote ourselves to the sacred practice of showing up for him even when it was hard, when we could rest in the awe of it all. It didn’t cure his illness, but it reminded us of us — the fabric, the tenderness, the main thing. Wait, you're not a member yet? Join the Reasons to be Cheerful community by supporting our nonprofit publication and giving what you can. Join Cancel anytime I wish that same reminder for our country in the months and years ahead — a way to keep our eye on the systemic harm, while keeping our hands in the dirt of our own communities. There are people in our midst who have lost their way through deep delusion, but there are also better angels: The family that offers a strange old man a sandwich; the organizers fighting for clean water for everyone, no exceptions; the daughters of the revolution baking casseroles for the undocumented families hiding in an attic room of their Minneapolis neighbors’ homes.  May we never turn away from the systemic injustice, but may we also turn towards the small and beautiful. It’s all real and deeply interconnected, and deserves our fierce attention. The post What Dementia Taught Me About Living Through a Callous Time appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful .