From September 2022 until his death in August 2025, my father-in-law lived in an Alzheimer’s care facility. We had moved him from Lakewood, Washington, where he’d lived and worked for over a decade after his retirement as a full colonel with 30 years’ service in the United States Air Force as a psychologist. His friends had become more alarmed at his memory lapses and confusion, worrying it was more than natural cognitive decline. With no family in the area, we decided to move him close to us.
We didn’t know many things at the outset, but we did know he was no longer able to live alone, and we had few options because of the immediacy of his needs.
Through my journey with my father-in-law in the last years of his life and seeing how he ended up with his daughter making all his decisions, I learned a great deal about my own attitudes toward seeking regular medical care. It’s not that I believe I am too strong and independent to ever need care. It’s that I am afraid they will discover something about me that will shatter my whole existence.
Behind the lies
My father-in-law’s high IQ made it easy for him to cover up what was happening to him. He created an elaborate set of excuses as to why he wasn’t suffering from Alzheimer’s, but just having a little brain fog. And because he was a doctor, still articulate, and because he was very intelligent, all his friends believed him.
But my wife had started to catch signs of cognitive decline over the phone — little slips here and there — so during one conversation she asked what doctors did to check for brain health. Being a psychologist, he described all the same tests the Mayo Clinic recommends: “Perform tasks that measure your cognitive skills. The tasks help to evaluate your memory, abstract thinking, problem-solving, language usage and related skills.”
He indicated that his doctor told him he had no concerns. His symptoms, my father-in-law explained, came from mold in the attic after a roof leak. “But it’s cleared now,” he said. “I’ll bounce back.”
My wife ended the call relieved that he was getting help and thinking all was fine in her world.
But he hadn’t actually gone to the doctor. It was just a ruse to make his daughter feel better.
It took time for us to understand that he had never discussed his symptoms with any medical professional. Instead, he had turned to a charlatan who promised to “retrain” his brain through games, supplements, and theories that would have made him roll his eyes back when he was practicing. The regimen cost thousands of dollars, wasn’t covered by insurance, and he couldn’t even follow the schedule even if it had worked.
Meanwhile, his actual primary-care doctor knew nothing — nothing about the decline, nothing about the quack treatments, nothing about the crisis unfolding.
The person your family depends on
When I was a single father, my two daughters depended on me in many ways. One of those ways was to be the source of stability in their lives. I knew it would cause them anxiety if they thought something bad was going to happen to me. I could see it in their eyes even if I rolled an ankle. They relied on me, and for me to look like all was well meant they didn’t have to worry about what would happen to them, that I would never be suddenly incapacitated or gone. I needed to make them feel that things would be OK, that I would always be there.
This drive doesn’t go away because the kids become adults. It’s in us the way our heartbeat is in us. It’s been part of society since modern humans evolved 200,000 years ago. Our life expectancy has increased by decades, but men like me still carry the drive to be the protective father well past what our life expectancy would have been in previous eras.
Seeing what happened to my father-in-law made me realize that, yes, family still needs us — but family also needs us to be honest about our health and address early symptoms when they crop up. This will provide more comfort than having them learn you are in the later stages of illness when the worst is about to happen.
Independence and work ethic
My father-in-law had told his story so convincingly. He simply had mold in the attic, and it was just a matter of time until he was back to normal. Everyone believed he was going to specialists at the hospital on the military base.
No one dreamed he had actually been conned.
While my father-in-law was wasting thousands of dollars on quack treatments, meanwhile his primary care doctor had been kept so far out of the loop that he was unwilling to help us fill in the physical examination paperwork when we needed to admit my father-in-law to the Alzheimer’s care facility.
But even as I felt frustrated at the situation, part of me understood all too well why he did what he did. Men are taught from an early age that our value comes from our usefulness: Fixing problems, supporting families, staying strong. Losing independence feels like stepping off a cliff. For some men, going to the doctor can feel like taking the first step toward losing a driver’s license, a job, a home, or the image of ourselves we’ve carried for decades.
And if we can’t be the dependable one anymore … who are we?
It’s easier to believe in puzzles, crystal bracelets, diet tweaks, and rituals that let us feel in control. It is powerful theater, and keeps a person feeling he is the captain of his soul. A talisman is easier to hold than fear.
The journey with my father-in-law made me think about being diagnosed with something incurable like Alzheimer’s. One day, my father-in-law was in the world, a man with friends, active in his church, goes sea kayaking and teaches kids and the elderly how to ski; how could he face becoming a man who could barely get on a ski lift by himself?
When illness threatens that identity, denial becomes a shield. A colleague of my wife’s was recently diagnosed with very early Alzheimer’s. He began treatment but refuses to retire, even though he’s eligible. His work and his identity are wrapped up into one thing. Without it, he fears becoming adrift in a version of himself he won’t recognize. After all, as men we often introduce ourselves by what we do as the way of saying who we are.
What I’m learning is that facing up to illness offers its own opportunities. It’s a time to consider what you want to do before you are unable to. This is your chance to make your own decisions about where to live out your life, how to get the medical help you need, discuss health care directives, and funeral/estate arrangements. None of it is easy, but it is even harder to leave those choices all to your family.
The person you were will change regardless of whether you accept the situation. The chance for true self-determination will be lost if you wait too long to be in the discussions of how to care for you through the decline.
Write a new ending
My father-in-law had done everything right for his brain health: stayed physically active through kayaking and skiing, stayed mentally active by reading and learning even after retiring, and stayed socially active with friends and church. Everything, that is, except the big one: Going to see his primary care doctor with his concerns instead of brushing them off.
That cuts to something deeper in all of us men: We are infamous for never going to see the doctor.
When someone says fear is the reason men don’t go to health checkups, it sounds superficial and condescending. It’s more of a dread, like you’re tied to the railroad tracks with the Amtrak rolling at you. But if we don’t know what’s coming down the tracks, then we don’t have to worry about it. We think a hard diagnosis will tell us the end of our story way before we’re ready to hear it.
Health advice is rational, but it occurs to me that the forces that keep us from seeking care are not. You can’t logic your way around dread. You need a story, a narrative that’s strong enough to challenge the one denial tells. And as a writer and writing teacher, I have learned the power of story to change people’s lives, to shift ways of seeing the world.
In trauma psychology, clinicians like Judith Herman and Jonathan Shay, famed for their research with military veterans and PTSD, describe how storytelling helps people process what their brains can’t otherwise hold. But in the case of a health issue, the story we need to tell is a cautionary tale, one that connects our fear to our responsibilities.
Not: “I’m fine. I don’t need the doctor.”
But: “I love people who depend on me. They deserve my honesty and my planning.”
Early detection gives families more time. It protects finances. It lets a man participate in decisions about how he wants to live and how he wants to die. It gives him agency, not takes it away.
The realization my father-in-law’s experience brought me is this: When we hide our symptoms, when we avoid the doctor, when we pretend we’re fine, we aren’t protecting the people we love. We’re guaranteeing that the day they learn the truth will be one of the worst days of their lives.
I realize it’s not a diagnosis that could shatter me. It’s not getting it early enough to prepare for what’s to come. Independence comes from going to the doctor on my terms and being able to make decisions about how it will impact my life and, importantly, help me mitigate the pain and trouble it causes my loved ones. It is thanks to my father-in-law that I will approach doctor’s visits with a new responsibility for my wife and daughters.
This is what all men should consider. Who knows, maybe the story begins with a negative diagnosis, and you are ready now to embrace life with a new attitude free from denial.