What Caregiving Taught Me About Love: A Sunday Reflection

I used to think I knew what love looked like.

It was the easy version — the wedding photos, the birthdays remembered, the inside jokes, the someone who reaches for your hand without thinking. Love as recognition. Love as reciprocity. Love as the comfortable hum of being known by someone who knows you back.

Then dementia entered our family. And love, slowly, had to learn a new shape.

What it asks of you

In the early stages, love still looked familiar. There were still long conversations, sharp humor, the same face I'd known my whole life. The forgetting was small and forgivable. We laughed about it. You already told me that, Mom — but tell me again.

Then there were the appointments. The new doctors. The first time she introduced me to a friend as "this is my..." and trailed off, searching. Daughter, Mom. I'm your daughter. The way her face changed when she landed on the word.

Love, then, asked me to be patient.

Then it asked me to be the strong one — to manage the medication, the calls, the paperwork — while she became smaller and more uncertain. Love asked me to make decisions she used to make herself. To handle her finances. To explain her to people who didn't know her before.

And then, eventually, love asked me to keep loving her exactly as I always had, even when she could no longer love me back in the way I was used to receiving.

That's the part nobody warns you about.

What love stops needing

I learned, slowly, that love does not require recognition.

There were Sundays she didn't know my name. There were moments she introduced me to herself, as a stranger sitting in her own living room. There were afternoons she called me by her sister's name — her sister who had been gone for twenty years — and I let her, because the relief on her face was the only thing that mattered.

I thought, at first, that these moments would break me. They didn't. What I learned is that the deepest part of love — the part that does the actual carrying — doesn't require a name. It doesn't require credit. It doesn't require being seen.

You can love someone with your whole heart while they look at you like a kind stranger. You can love them when they're scared of you. You can love them when they're nobody you recognize anymore.

It doesn't feel like the love you signed up for. But it is, somehow, more love than you knew you were capable of.

What it gives back

Here is the part I didn't expect:

Dementia caregiving taught me that love is not a feeling. It's a practice. It's the steady, daily showing up — even when no one is keeping score, even when the person you're showing up for cannot remember that you were there yesterday.

It taught me that presence is the thing. Not productivity. Not perfection. Not the right words at the right time. Just being there. Being soft. Being a face she recognized, on the days when she could, and a kind stranger on the days when she couldn't.

It taught me that memory is overrated. The body remembers what the mind forgets. She would close her eyes when I held her hand in a particular way — the same way I'd held it since I was a kid. The body knew. The body remembered everything.

It taught me that love survives loss in ways I didn't believe were possible.

A Sunday thought

If you're reading this on a Sunday, and the week ahead feels heavy, here's what I want to offer you:

The love you are doing right now — even when it feels invisible, even when it feels unreciprocated, even when it feels like nothing is reaching them — is the real thing.

It's the most distilled version of love a person can practice. No transactions. No expectations. No fair return. Just devotion, repeated daily, with no audience.

That is love at its purest. And you are doing it.

Sometime today, give yourself a small mercy. A cup of coffee on the porch. A few minutes in the garden. A quiet ten minutes that belong only to you.

Your love is reaching them. Even when it doesn't look like it. Even when no one else can see.

We see you.

→ Find quiet activities that let you sit beside them on hard days — free at CarePrints.