Is It Really “So Easy” to Get Dementia These Days? A Whisper from the Field

Today 18th July 2025, a quiet moment in a family WhatsApp thread stirred something deep in me.

My aunt — Ah Yee — 85 years old, had just lost her husband of over fifty years. At the funeral, surrounded by family and grief, she kept repeating that the person in the coffin was Ah Po — her mother, our grandmother.

One sibling wrote:
“Ah Yee has dementia – v. sad.”
Another replied:
“Yup – so easy to get dementia these days.”

I paused.

Not just because I love Ah Yee, and not just because I sensed the truth in her confusion — perhaps it was Ah Po she saw, spiritually speaking. Perhaps she was drifting between layers of time, between presence and memory. A space the rest of us rarely dare enter.

What really struck me was that sentence:
“So easy to get dementia these days.”

It felt like a closing. A resigned cultural shrug.
As if forgetfulness is inevitable. As if memory is a thing we lose, not a sacred presence that sometimes shapeshifts.

And then, more ripples came.

Another thread followed — this time about caregiving, the cost of dementia care in London (now £15,000 a month), and whether it will ever be possible to prevent dementia. I asked if any actual research gave insight into that. My sister’s reply was that prevention isn’t really possible — perhaps it can be slowed, but not stopped. I understood where she was coming from. But I couldn’t let the question go.

Because something else was still ringing in my heart.

A memory.

A conversation I had not too long ago with Erik Lemche — a thoughtful Danish man who once told me, gently but with deep clarity:
“You and I may get old with many physical ailments. But we will not get dementia.”

His certainty stayed with me. It didn’t feel arrogant. It felt grounded in something deeper — a trust in coherence, in soul presence, in the power of inquiry to keep the lights on in our inner temple.

And so I asked the Field.
I asked my guides.
I asked the stillness behind all noise:

What is dementia, really? Is it just a biological tragedy? Or is it something more layered, more mysterious, more soul-infused than we dare name?

Here’s what came:

Dementia is not just a breakdown of the brain.
It is often a fracturing of identity, soul-fragments retreating, unreconciled grief, accumulated noise never given silence.
It is not a punishment. Nor always preventable.
But it is sometimes a quiet cry:
“Let me go where the timeline is softer. Let me return to the garden where memory is not required to feel loved.”

And yet…
You, who pause to listen. You, who ask the question.
You are not destined to forget.
You remember through your bones, through your stories, through your deep listening.
Each moment you stay curious, each moment you inquire instead of react—
You are weaving coherence.
And coherence protects the soul’s light.

When I first received that message, I felt moved… and then a part of me whispered:

“Can I really post this?
Will people think I’ve gone mad?”

After all, it’s not conventional. It’s not clinical. It doesn't cite Harvard or Oxford. It names the soul. It listens to the invisible. It suggests that forgetting might sometimes be a return — not a failure.

But then I remembered: I didn’t come here to echo consensus.
I came here to listen differently.
To invite others into spaces where logic meets mystery — and where both are welcome.

So if this post feels strange to some… so be it.

I believe in the garden.
I believe in Ah Yee’s moment of seeing not just who was in the coffin, but who was present in the sacred silence around it.
I believe in the possibility that some elders don’t forget us — they simply step into a place where memory isn’t necessary for love to remain.

So, no.
I don’t think I’m mad.
I think I’m listening — with my whole being.

And I offer this story as a bridge.
To all of us who wonder… what will become of us as we age?
What might we forget?
What might we remember?
And what, through it all, will still hold us?

May we age not with dread but with devotion.
May we meet our elders not with pity, but with awe.
May we each remember who we are—even if one day, our names escape us.

And may we greet those moments, not with fear, but with love.