Journaling when a parent has dementia: keeping the record and the person

Caring for a parent with dementia is two jobs at once. There's the practical one, which is medical and administrative and relentless. And there's the other one, which is grieving someone who is still in the room.

A journal is one of the few things that helps with both, partly because there is nobody else keeping either record.

Keep the clinical log separately

Dates, changes, medications, what a doctor said, when the confusion is worst, what triggered a bad afternoon.

This is genuinely useful. Appointments are short and rely on your account, and a written record of the last three months is far better evidence than trying to remember under pressure. It's also what makes it possible to notice a decline that's happening too slowly to see day to day.

Write the unspeakable parts too

Anger at a parent who is no longer responsible for their behaviour. Relief when a visit is cancelled. Wishing it were over, followed immediately by guilt about wishing it. Resentment toward siblings who do nothing and phone monthly to have opinions.

All of that is extremely common and almost never said out loud, because it sounds monstrous out of context. It isn't. It's what happens to people doing a job with no end date.

Record who they were

This is the entry people most regret not writing. As the illness progresses, it becomes harder to hold on to the person your parent actually was, and the last years quietly overwrite the previous fifty.

So write them down. Their phrases. How they told a story. What they were like at forty. What they'd have said about all this. That's the thing you're trying to protect, and it's the part that memory loses first when the day to day is this heavy.

Note the good moments precisely

There are still moments: a song they respond to, a lucid ten minutes, a joke that lands. They're easy to lose in the general difficulty.

Writing them down does two things. It gives you something to reread in a hard week, and it builds a practical list of what still reaches them, which is useful information for you and for anyone else providing care.

Start your own private journal tonight.

Innera keeps your stories encrypted on your device. Free to start.

Download on the App Store

Free to start. Your stories stay encrypted on your device.

Prompts for the long haul

• What changed this week, factually?
• What am I feeling that I couldn't say to my family?
• What reached them today?
• What do I want to remember about who they were?
• What help do I need, and who could actually provide it?

Write about your own life too

Caregiving expands to fill everything, and years pass in which the carer's own life is entirely undocumented. Keep a line a week about you: work, a friend, something you enjoyed. You will want proof that you were also alive during this period.

Why it must be private

This contains a parent's medical details, honest anger toward them, and unflattering truths about siblings you still have to work with. Found by any of them, it would cause serious harm, and knowing that is exactly what stops people writing the entries that would help them most.

Innera keeps every story encrypted on your device, so the whole of this, the log and the rage and the love, can exist in one place that's yours.