He Thanked His Dementia. What’s Your Excuse?
I have never gone back to the same man twice. Every guy who shows up in my writing gets one post, one moment, one mirror, and then I move on.
Wally broke that.
Last time I wrote about him, it was his choice to die on his own terms before the disease made that choice for him. We didn’t agree on it. I told him what I tell every man I sit with: I don’t tell another man what to do with his life, and I’m not going to start telling him what to do with his death. That conversation was one of the hardest and most honest I’ve had in years.
I figured that was the whole story with Wally.
Then he did something I wasn’t ready for. He thanked the dementia.
Not as a coping line. Not as something he’d talked himself into.
“I like who I’ve become since the diagnosis more than who I was before it.”
He doesn’t experience the disease as loss. He experiences it as an opening. He used to think clearly and feel like a stranger to himself. Now the thinking is unreliable, and the feeling is the clearest thing he has.
I keep turning that over. A man losing his mind, telling me he has never been closer to himself.
What We’ve Built Our Identity On
Most of us have quietly decided that the mind is where we live. Lose the sharpness of your thinking and you’ve lost yourself, that’s the assumption baked into how we talk about aging, illness, decline.
Wally is standing in the middle of that assumption, and it isn’t holding.
He’s proof that a man’s clarity of thought and his capacity to love are not the same instrument. Somewhere along the way, we convinced ourselves the first one mattered more.
It didn’t happen because he got soft. It happened because something that used to run the show got quiet enough to let something else through.
Why We Built It This Way
I don’t think men suppress feeling because we’re broken. For most of history, a man who felt too much didn’t come back from the hunt. He didn’t hold the line. He didn’t provide, and providing was survival, for him and everyone depending on him.
We inherited that wiring for good reason:
Head first. Gut second. Action third. Heart came last because heart was a liability.
But none of us are on that hunt anymore. Most of us are across the table from:
- A wife who wants to be felt, not managed
- A kid who wants to be seen, not corrected
- A father who’s dying and doesn’t need another problem solved, just a hand
And we keep telling ourselves we’ll get there. After the next deal closes. After retirement. After the diagnosis, when we finally have no choice.
That’s the part of Wally’s story that actually unsettles me. Not that dementia opened something in him. That it took dementia to do it.
You Don’t Need the Diagnosis
Here’s what I keep coming back to. Wally didn’t choose this. It found him, and to his enormous credit, he let it change him instead of hardening him against it.
But you and I don’t get to wait for something to find us.
We have the harder, better option: choosing this on purpose, while we still have all our faculties and no excuse.
Head, gut, action, none of that needs practice from most men. It’s already running. Heart is the one skill that atrophies from disuse, and it will keep atrophying until you decide otherwise.
By the time you read this, Wally may have already chosen to leave. Whenever that day comes, let his legacy be more than the wisdom of his words. Let it be the transformation of our lives, starting with learning to feel our feelings, say them out loud, and open a heart most of us have kept locked for decades.
Honestly, that is some real clear thinking for a man supposedly losing his mind.
As for me, I want that same clarity. That same intention. I want to stop leading with my head and start leading with my heart, the way Wally finally learned to.
That’s the man I want to see in the glass.
Watch the full conversation with Wally: https://youtu.be/09tPRBoqp_w
