When Memory Fades, Feeling Remains.

Our Mum Has Dementia

It’s an exceptionally cruel disease. It doesn’t just steal your memory, it takes everything, your sense of self. It chips away at your dignity, your ability to speak clearly, to connect with others, to perform the smallest everyday tasks we all take for granted.

Her world has become smaller and smaller.

She struggles to follow conversations. Her words come out in fragments. She can’t always tell what’s real and what isn’t. It’s confusing. It’s frightening. And it’s incredibly painful to watch.

But there’s something I’ve come to see clearly.

Even as the structure of her mind breaks down, her capacity to feel remains. That part of her has never left. Even when she can’t make sense of what’s happening, her feelings cut through.

Last week, I was away on holiday. She didn’t fully understand where I’d gone. But when I returned, she told me she felt better because she felt I was “back on her shoulder.” It didn’t make complete sense logically, but emotionally, I knew exactly what she meant. She had felt my absence, and she felt safer once I was back.

She forgets that our dad is gone. She can’t remember when he died, or even how. Every day, she has to rediscover that loss. And every day, it hurts her. She dreams of him at night, and in the mornings she’s still with him. But by lunchtime, she’s questioning her reality. Yesterday, she told me, “I feel the pain of remembering he has gone every day.” Even when the memory doesn’t last, the grief always finds her.

It’s made me realise something I hadn’t truly understood before: we’re born with feeling. As babies, we cry when we’re hungry or cold or frightened, long before we can explain why. And now, at the end of life, my mum still feels. She can’t make cognitive sense of her thoughts anymore, but her emotional core is still there. It’s as strong as ever.

So why is it that when we are able, we’re never really taught how to live with our feelings? How to understand them, sit with them, or accept them without shame or judgment? Instead, we’re taught to hide them, to push them down, as if they’re a weakness - or as if facing them is somehow dangerous.

In the end, feelings are what remain.

They give life its depth. They shape how we connect, how we remember, how we find meaning even when memory and language are gone.

Feelings aren’t just a part of being human. They are the very essence of it.

The Emotions Lab