dementia conversations – A granddaughter describes how her grandpa’s dementia shifted conversations from reality to fantasy, and why she came to love the “nonsense.”
A single question about a favorite color can sound harmless—until dementia turns everyday talk into something else entirely.
My grandpa would sometimes answer questions with a version of his own life that didn’t quite match the moment we were sharing.. “What’s your favorite color, grandpa?” I’d ask, and he might pause, drift mid-sentence, and lose his place.. Then he’d offer a surprising story that felt both vivid and wrong: he claimed he drove the Queen of England around Zimbabwe when he was a boy. before trailing off again as worry spread across his face.
The details mattered less than the pattern.. Toward the end of his life. conversations often worked like this: I’d ask something simple. and he would rarely answer it directly.. Instead, his mind would land on a fantastical response.. In the telling was a thin thread of truth—he really did live in Zimbabwe as a child—but the bigger narratives weren’t meant literally.. The disconnect wasn’t a choice; confusion simply moved in and took over, pulling his attention away from the present.
My mom, though, experienced the change differently.. She struggled with the gaps between reality and the stories her father reached for.. Those moments left her feeling lost. because she couldn’t hold onto the kind of meaningful conversation she’d known her whole life—one where her dad showed up as himself. consistently and fully.. Instead. she saw him appear only in fragments. in short bursts. before the mental fog swallowed the thread of the talk.
Meanwhile, I felt something closer to surprise than loss in those exchanges.. Maybe it was shaped by the years I spent around people who loved playful. off-the-wall banter. but I found a way to enjoy the conversations that dementia had remixed.. When he seemed normal—say. when I asked if he’d like a cup of tea and he simply said “yes”—it reminded me there was still a person in there responding in his own way.. Other times. my gentle questions would derail into tangents on topics unrelated to what I asked. or he’d deliver a comedic line with perfect timing.
I didn’t treat those detours as failures.. I learned to banter inside the rules dementia created.. Sometimes I’d ask him questions about his childhood in Croatia. then sit back and follow where his mind decided to go.. The unrelated topics that surfaced mid-answer didn’t bother me; it sometimes felt like we were playing a word game without instructions. where the “wrong” turn was part of the fun rather than a problem to fix.
My mom couldn’t quite join that mood, and her reaction brought a heavier layer of emotion.. I remember her asking me, “You’re so good with him.. How do you talk with him like that?” Her question was the first time I fully sensed how different our experiences were: she was grieving in real time. while I was reacting to the same changes with a kind of enjoyment that felt both sincere and. later. uncomfortable.
That discomfort turned into guilt.. I questioned whether I was being careless or even unfair—whether I should have tried harder to keep him on track. or whether I was somehow making the situation worse.. The questions stayed with me because the stakes were personal: it felt like loving him during dementia might conflict with the idea of doing what was “right.”
What helped me steady my mind was what I saw in him.. During our chats, he seemed happy most of the time.. Yes. there were moments when my questions sparked offense or when he bristled unexpectedly. but even those interruptions didn’t dominate the overall tone.. For the most part, he stayed relaxed, and the conversations felt like they belonged to him.
Later, I learned there was a name for the approach I’d been using without realizing it: validation therapy.. It’s described as a person-centered approach developed by Naomi Feil that focuses on accepting the person’s reality rather than trying to pull them back into ours.. That framing helped explain why my relationship to his “nonsense” didn’t feel like I was ignoring something important—it was more like meeting him where he was already living.
It also left room for the hardest question: what was happening inside his mind?. Was there a version of him that remained aware of the shift, even as the world blurred?. Or did he simply experience each conversation as the single moment his story landed on—tea. the Queen. Croatia. Zimbabwe—without any awareness that the scene didn’t match the one we were standing in.
In the end. I kept returning to the sound of it: the strange. funny. rambling rhythm we found together as his mind changed.. Losing the man my mom and I knew was still undeniably sad.. But I also came to recognize that dementia reshaped him in a way I would never have met otherwise. and that the “real talks” dementia took away were replaced with something else—raw. unbounded. and deeply human.
dementia conversations validation therapy grandpa memory loss family grief caregiver experience Naomi Feil