My grandfather, my grampie, served in the United States Navy after World War II. He was stationed on a minesweeper ship. Do you know what that means? It means he went in after the fighting, into waters still full of hidden explosives, so that others could pass through safely. Quiet work. Dangerous work. Essential work.
He didn't talk about it much. That was true of a lot of people from that generation.
Years later, dementia would take pieces of him. The same way it took pieces of all four of my grandparents. And later I found myself, as a physical therapist, working for the Maine Veterans' Homes every single day for 11 years, caring for veterans just like him.
Do I think that was a coincidence? No. I really don't.
I was a physical therapist there. My job was to help people move, to maintain function, to keep them as independent as possible for as long as possible. That was the clinical job.
But here's what I learned pretty quickly. The job and the work are not always the same thing.
The work was listening.
These veterans, many of them living with moderate to advanced dementia, couldn't always tell me what they had for breakfast. They couldn't always tell me the year or the name of the president. But do you know what they could tell me? They could tell me about the cold. The particular, bone-through cold of a Belgian winter in December of 1944. They could describe the color of the water at Omaha Beach at first light. They could tell me exactly what it felt like to be 19 years old and terrified and still moving forward anyway.
Why is that? How does someone forget breakfast but remember the smell of a battlefield sixty, seventy, eighty years later?
It's not magic. It's neuroscience. Long-term memory, especially memory tied to intense emotion, is often among the last to go in dementia. The most recent memories fade first. But the ones that were seared into the nervous system, the ones the body actually lived through, those can stay accessible long after everything else has started to blur. I've watched it happen more times than I can count. It still gets me every time.
And for these veterans, those memories weren't small things. They were everything.
I cared for veterans who had been taken prisoner and survived captivity. Those who stormed the beaches of Normandy and fought through the Ardennes at the Battle of the Bulge. Those who missed the births of their own children because they were somewhere in the Pacific or in Europe or in Korea or Vietnam, doing things they never fully talked about, even decades later. Veterans who were chronically ill from Agent Orange exposure. Veterans whose bodies were still carrying the weight of severe PTSD, and it showed up in my PT sessions every single day. In their muscle tension. In their startle responses. In their resistance to touch.
And the women. The nurses who worked in field hospitals under fire. The mechanics who kept the planes in the air. The map makers and the spies who operated in the shadows and rarely got credit for any of it. The wives who held families together alone for years, who planted victory gardens and worked factory lines and prayed every single day that the person they loved would come home. They were all there. They all had stories. And dementia did not spare any of them either.
Were they difficult patients? No. They were people who had been through things most of us will never understand, and their nervous systems had never fully been allowed to rest. To heal.
They told me things. Not because I asked. Something in a session would open a door, a movement, a sound, a moment of quiet, and suddenly I wasn't their physical therapist anymore. I was just someone present enough to receive what they needed to say. Have you ever had a moment like that with someone in your care? Where the role fell away and it was just two people?
Some of them got to go on Honor Flights to Washington, D.C. I helped prepare them for those trips, working on their endurance and their mobility so they could actually make the journey. I wasn't there when they arrived. But when they came back, the pictures came with them. And I want to ask you something. Have you ever looked at a photograph and felt like you were witnessing something sacred? There were pictures of veterans who could barely walk standing at attention and saluting. Others sitting quietly among people who had lived through the same things they had, people who just got it, no explanation needed. The confusion that could make an ordinary Tuesday almost impossible was nowhere in those pictures. The person who stormed a beach or survived a prison camp or mapped a route through enemy territory was right there, fully present. I kept those images in my mind for a long time.
And then COVID came.
Families couldn't come inside. The people my residents loved most in the world were suddenly on the other side of a screen. It fell to us, the staff, to hold the tablet, to position it just right, to make sure the connection didn't drop. I sat with veterans who had survived some of the most harrowing events of the twentieth century as they said goodbye to their children and grandchildren over Zoom, not knowing if it was the last time.
Sometimes it was.
I think about all of them every Memorial Day. I think about them a lot, honestly. But today, I remember who they were before they were my patients. I remember that every veteran I helped stand up from a chair had once stood on ground that most of us only read about in history books.
And I think about my grampie. About the minesweeper. About the waters he helped clear so others could come home. About what it meant that dementia eventually took some of his stories too, the same way it took so many of the veterans I cared for in Maine. I didn't get to sit with him the way I sat with my residents. But caring for them was, in some way I still can't fully put into words, how I honored him.
Is it any wonder that I made the decision, standing in those buildings, to dedicate myself to this work? To get certified? To spend the last 15 years building the education and tools I wish had existed when I was working those long days up in Maine?
The people sitting across from us every day deserve care that starts with understanding. Not management. Not behavior correction. Understanding.
If you've been moved by someone in your care the way I was moved by mine, whether you're a family caregiver who's heard stories you weren't expecting, or a healthcare professional who keeps sensing there is so much more beneath the surface than a diagnosis, I want you to sit with that feeling. Don't dismiss it. That feeling is telling you something.
The Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia Care Seminar, recognized by the Alzheimer's Association and the required prerequisite for earning the Certified Dementia Practitioner credential, is one place to take that feeling somewhere. It's built for people who already care deeply and are ready to care more skillfully. Click here for more information.
To every veteran who shared their story with me: thank you. I have carried you with me ever since.
And to my grampie: I see you in all of them.
About the Author
Carlyn Lenfestey is a licensed Physical Therapist with 25 years of clinical experience and 15 years of dementia specialization. She is a Certified Dementia Practitioner (CDP) and Certified Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia Care Trainer (CADDCT), and the creator of the Wheel of Function Framework™. Her work helps family caregivers and healthcare professionals transform the hardest moments of dementia care into manageable, dignified ones.
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