Remembering My Father: Love, Memory, and the Lessons of Dementia

My Dad is at his happy place, Smith Mountain Lake in Virginia.

While dementia was never listed as the cause of death on my father’s certificate, it was the powerful anchor that pulled him there. Like so many, he did not die of dementia, but he certainly died with it. And in the years leading up to that moment, I walked beside him through the long, uneven decline of memory loss—a journey that changed the way I understand both the brain and the human spirit.

This is not a medical article. I am not a neurologist, though I have spent much of my life studying how the brain works. I know enough neuroscience and behavioral psychology to be dangerous, but not enough to claim expertise on dementia’s pathology. Instead, this is a story about my father: a quiet, hard-working, loving man who shaped the person I am today.

About the author: Jeff Hulett leads Personal Finance Reimagined, a decision-making and financial education platform. He teaches personal finance at James Madison University and provides personal finance seminars. Check out his book -- Making Choices, Making Money: Your Guide to Making Confident Financial Decisions.

Jeff is a career banker, data scientist, behavioral economist, and choice architect. Jeff has held banking and consulting leadership roles at Wells Fargo, Citibank, KPMG, and IBM.

The Man I Knew

My father was not perfect—no one is. He carried demons, some of which may have planted the seeds of dementia. He suffered bouts of depression. He grew up in poverty, the son of poor sharecropping farmers in Vermont, where hardship was the norm. As a boy, he drank unpasteurized milk that left him with lasting stomach issues. At times, I wondered if he may have wrestled with feelings of inferiority. It would not have surprised me, given that he lived in the shadow of his father-in-law, a towering CEO in agriculture, and my mother, a pioneering female executive in the homebuilding industry.

But it is equally true that my father had his share of successes. He was a first-generation college student, earning an MBA from Syracuse University and blazing the higher-education path for me and my siblings. He went on to build a meaningful career in the television and radio broadcasting industry, showing us by example that persistence and education could open doors. And at home, I saw him as a supportive husband, standing by my mother through the challenges she faced while building her own successful business.

But none of that defined him for me. To me, he was a man of faith, a loving husband, and—most of all—a devoted dad. He was steady, thoughtful, and present. That is the father I remember most from childhood.

Dementia as a Mirror of the Mind

Dementia is, at its root, a disorder of memory. And memory is not just the filing cabinet of past experiences—it is the fuel that powers the brain’s predictive machine. Without memory, cognition falters. Without cognition, the body follows. It is a vicious feedback loop, not unlike a muscle wasting away from disuse.

But memory does something even more profound. It is also the regulator of personality. Our cultural programming—what is polite, what is acceptable, what faith or tradition expects from us—rests on the scaffolding of memory. Strip away memory, and you strip away much of the control system that governs our social behavior. What is left is raw being: the self that existed before cultural layers, before advertising and social comparisons, before the masks we wear to fit in. In this way, dementia is revelatory.

That self is not always easy to see. In some people, dementia lays bare anger or bitterness—emotions that memory once kept safely behind guardrails. I have known people in dementia’s grip who grew meaner as their disease progressed, as if rage itself was their elemental truth.

But my father’s journey was different.

The Man He Became

As dementia stripped away his anxieties, comparisons, and insecurities, what remained was not a smaller version of him, but a truer one. What emerged was one of the most joyful, kind, and loving people I have ever known.

He became more present to the world around him. My sister remembers how, in those later years, walks with him felt different—softer, slower, more attentive. He noticed the small details in nature: the curve of a leaf, the song of a bird, the way the light shifted at dusk. He had always loved nature, but dementia seemed to amplify it, making him more open to beauty in the moment.

In her book My Stroke of Insight, neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor describes experiencing a stroke in the left hemisphere of her cerebral cortex. When that memory-dependent part of her brain shut down, she found herself freed to live fully in the expansive present, deeply immersed in the beauty of the moment. I often wondered if my father was experiencing something similar. As memory loosened its grip, he seemed more anchored in presence—drawn to the simple wonders around him with a clarity and joy that was almost childlike. Perhaps, like Jill Bolte Taylor described, he was relying more on his right hemisphere and the parts of the brain less dependent on long-term memory—those that allow us to live fully in the present, unburdened by the weight of the past.

He adored his grandchildren. They never knew him as a man struggling with depression or self-doubt. They knew him as "papa"— the grandfather who would happily spend hours searching for the perfect apples to make pie for breakfast. They knew him as the man who, after seventy years of trying, finally caught a striper bass and celebrated with the delight of a child riding a bike for the first time.

When I look back, I realize his dementia years gave my children the gift of knowing their grandfather at his most open, gentle, and authentic. That is no small blessing.

Lessons I Carry Forward

Dementia is cruel. It robs memory, steals independence, and demands patience from everyone in its orbit. But in my father’s case, it also revealed something profound: the essential goodness at his core.

As a student of the brain, I cannot help but reflect on what this means. Neuroscience teaches us that memory is not just storage—it is identity. But his story suggests something deeper: beneath memory lies being. And when memory falls away, sometimes—just sometimes—what remains is the best of us.

For me, this knowledge carries both grief and gratitude. Grief for the father I slowly lost. Gratitude for the man I still carry with me—the man who showed me, even in decline, the kind of person I hope to become.

Closing Thought

When I think of my father, I do not see dementia. I see the man who taught me faith, perseverance, and love. I see the man who worked quietly but left loud lessons. And I see the man who, in losing so much of himself, revealed the truest self of all.

That is the memory I will keep alive. That is the inheritance I will pass to my children. And that is the way I will always respect and miss him.