Through the Kitchen Window
Most of my time with dementia isn’t spent sitting down.
It’s through a kitchen window.
Passing by with a cart.
Wiping a counter.
Pausing for questions that arrive without warning.
“Am I late?”
“Did I miss something?”
“Where are we supposed to be?”
They aren’t philosophical questions.
They’re orientation checks.
I don’t answer them with explanations.
I answer them with placement.
“You’re okay.”
“You’re right where you need to be.”
“We’re having lunch soon.”
What I’ve learned—slowly—is that dementia doesn’t ask for truth.
It asks for ground.
Orientation, Not Explanation
From this vantage, dementia doesn’t feel like disorder.
It feels like a system that can no longer afford abstraction.
People aren’t confused about who they are.
They’re unsure about where they are in time.
So they look for anchors.
A face.
A tone.
A steady voice.
Someone who doesn’t rush the answer.
I see it most clearly in the quick chats—the five-second exchanges that never make it into case notes.
A joke still lands.
A smile still registers.
A sigh releases when someone feels oriented again, even briefly.
From the kitchen window, it doesn’t look like memory loss.
It looks like sequence loss.
The Moment the System Stops Scoring
That’s where the pinball machine comes back to me.
I’ve always been fascinated by the tilt.
Not the flashing lights.
Not the score.
The moment the machine decides: this is too much.
Tilt isn’t failure.
It’s a boundary.
When the machine is shaken beyond what it’s designed to absorb, it doesn’t break.
It stops responding.
The ball is still there.
The table is still there.
The player is still there.
But the system withdraws cooperation.
Watching dementia up close feels similar.
Accumulation Without Release
A human life carries more than we admit:
memory layered on memory,
roles stacked on roles,
responsibility compounding quietly,
identity reinforced by continuity.
At some point, something stops translating experience into narrative.
So the rules suspend.
Scoring stops.
The story drops out.
What remains isn’t nothing.
Emotion without explanation.
Recognition without recall.
Fear without story.
Love without history.
We often call this malfunction.
But tilt isn’t malfunction.
It’s protection.
The system isn’t broken.
It’s preserving itself.
When Responsibility Outgrows Structure
Across a lifetime, responsibility widens.
It begins as Me—
learning where the self ends and the world begins.
It expands into Mine—
not possession, but care.
Something depends on you more than you depend on it.
With time, responsibility becomes Ours—
shared, inherited, entrusted.
Continuity matters more than command.
And eventually—if the grip loosens—it gestures toward We.
Not the erasure of the self,
but its integration into shared life.
What I’m seeing in dementia is what happens when the structures that once held Mine and Ours together can no longer do so.
Not because the person failed.
Because the accumulation outpaced capacity.
The nervous system doesn’t argue.
It tilts.
Holding Without Repair
And when that happens, the role of the world changes.
Not to correct.
Not to remind.
Not to force coherence.
But to become the rails—
steady enough that the moment doesn’t collapse.
This is why I don’t think dementia is best understood as forgetting.
It’s a human system saying:
“I can no longer carry the whole story.
But I can still carry now.”
So I meet people there.
Between tasks.
Between questions.
Between one moment and the next.
And sometimes, that’s enough.
The Ones Who Made It Back
Not everyone tilts.
Some people live long enough for the system to finish its arc.
Not by strength.
Not by discipline.
By time.
Centenarians often look simple from the outside—
quiet, slow, pared down.
But what I’m beginning to see
is not decline.
It’s return.
They’ve carried Me.
They’ve carried Mine.
They’ve carried Ours.
And somewhere deep into age, the grip loosens.
Not because they gave up,
but because the story no longer needs to be held so tightly.
What remains is presence.
Not enlightenment.
Not transcendence.
Just the unadorned posture
of being human again.
Most of us never reach that moment.
Many lives tilt before the return—
not because the person failed,
but because the load never eased long enough
for the system to come home.
Tilt is the nervous system saying:
“I cannot complete the cycle.
I cannot carry the story to its soft landing.
I must stop here.”
And still—
for those who live past the tilt,
whose systems were spared long enough—
something quieter often appears.
Gentler.
More elemental.
They become human again.
Not by going forward,
but by coming back.
A Quieter Question
I don’t think dementia is enlightenment.
I don’t think it’s a lesson wrapped in pathology.
I don’t think it’s something to explain.
But I do think it reveals something upstream.
About scale.
About accumulation.
About how much we ask human systems to hold
before stopping is labeled failure.
If leadership breaks when responsibility evolves faster than posture,
then dementia may be showing us the far edge of that same truth—
where stopping is not collapse,
but mercy.
The question it leaves me with isn’t what went wrong.
It’s quieter than that.
What kept going too long—
without enough places to set the ball down?