Good Days, Bad Days

People with dementia are still people.

Like the rest of us, they have good days and bad days.  And, in their case, they have days when they are more--or less--confused than others. 

This can be confusing to you.  Maybe you just started getting used to the idea that they are changing, and then, out of the blue, they start making perfect sense and seeming perfectly grounded in reality.

My reaction to these days (or moments, even) was "Oh, good!  Mom is okay!  All this other stuff was just my imagination!

Then she would say or do something that confirmed everything was not okay, and it was not my imagination.  And I found myself standing there not knowing what to trust, or what to believe about what was happening.  Everything I had learned about life up to that point, about order in the universe, and cause and effect, flew out the window.  It can be very unsettling.

It helped me when I began to understand that I was seeing "good days and bad days."  This I can relate to!  I have days when I feel mentally on top of the world and others when I find it difficult to think straight at all.  Even though what I experience is not dementia (we hope), I can still use that experience to understand that people with dementia are sometimes more "there" than at other times. And I can use that understanding to comfort myself on the bad days, knowing that there is a possibility of a better day--or moment--to come.