Grief & Loss
I'm watching a parent fade with dementia. How do I grieve someone who is still alive?
“Cast me not off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength faileth.”
This psalm is believed to be written by an elderly person facing vulnerability and fear of abandonment. It is a cry from someone who has lost capacities they once had and fears being discarded. Its presence in Scripture says that the experience of aging and decline is known by God and taken seriously, not something he looks away from.
“For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.”
Paul makes a distinction between the outer person and the inner person. For someone with dementia, the outer person is being taken over by the disease. But the inner person (the soul that God knows and loves) is not diminished by cognitive decline. This does not resolve the grief, but it offers a frame for who your parent still is.
A path forward
Allow yourself to mourn the person your parent used to be while still loving the person they are now. These are not contradictions, and naming the loss of who they were is not a betrayal of who they still are.
Find one way to connect with your parent that bypasses cognition: music from their past, physical touch, familiar prayers. Many dementia patients respond to things their explicit memory can no longer access.
Build in one form of respite for yourself every week. Caregiver grief is compounded by exhaustion, and you cannot sustain presence for your parent if you are running on empty.
Closing verse
“And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.”
- Isaiah 46:4
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