My worst fear is not death. Not really. It is losing my cognitive ability and perhaps not even fully realizing it. Worse still – sensing it vaguely, like a distant alarm bell muffled behind thick walls. Knowing something important to my life has slipped away but being unable to grasp what it was or where it disappeared to.

The concept of being trapped in the fog isn’t something I want to have to deal with. Living in a mental landscape where familiar thoughts no longer connect properly. Where memories dissolve mid-thought. Where language, logic and identity slowly loosen their grip while the world continues moving around you as if nothing happened.

And perhaps the cruelest part of all – never quite being able to find your way back out again.

That was more or less how I felt yesterday when I visited my father-in-law Allan, Charlotte’s father, at a dementia care facility in Göteborg.

All things considered, Allan was surprisingly perky. Every now and then flashes of his old humor surfaced – small reminders of the man who once occupied the space more fully.

At 88 he is frail now, physically diminished, with very little strength left. He needs assistance just to move around.

Watching him stirred thoughts I normally try to keep at arm’s length. I could not help but wonder whether this is also waiting somewhere ahead for me. Whether the gradual erosion of body and mind is simply part of the contract we all sign without reading carefully enough.

I hope not.

Not only for my own sake, but for Charlotte and for Elle. Because when cognition fades, it is not only the individual who disappears in fragments. The people who love them are forced to witness the slow unraveling too. And there is something uniquely brutal about watching someone still physically present while parts of the person you knew quietly vanish. Regress. From pampers to pampers.