4 ideas
August Geiger was a Vorarlberg farmer's son, WWII soldier and returned POW who built his own house in Wolfurt. His dementia was misread for years as stubbornness, indifference and neglect, and his children scolded him before they understood he was ill. In the diagnosed stage his son Arno recorded his odd, witty, often poetic sentences, and the family's relationship with him grew warmer as the illness advanced, through home care and finally a nursing home.
A person with dementia who begs to go home while sitting in the house they built is not naming a place. They are naming the loss of feeling safe and oriented. Home becomes the feeling of belonging, which the illness removes from the inside. So the fitting response is reassurance and closeness, not the literal correction that 'you are home'.
Once the ill person can no longer cross the bridge into the healthy person's reality, the healthy person has to cross over into theirs. Correcting, testing and pulling the person back to 'the facts' produces humiliation and conflict. Accepting their logic and moving within it restores contact and dignity.
As his father's memory and competence declined, Geiger found that some qualities stayed, such as humor, charm and a gift for surprising sentences, and that some abilities even seemed new. He also describes his own way of seeing his father changing, so that he noticed and valued these traits more than before. In his account this was part of why the relationship grew closer during the illness.