Should a medical diagnosis reshape the past? (2025)

Angela Chen examines whether her mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis should change how she understands a childhood marked by emotional distance, anger, and neglect. After the diagnosis, her father argues that the disease may have begun decades earlier, turning her mother’s behavior into symptoms rather than choices and asking the daughters to reconsider their judgments and forgive. Chen tests that explanation through a recurring question - “disease or disposition?” - considering whether her mother’s isolation, apathy, volatility, indecision, and lack of interest in her daughters came from dementia, depression, temperament, or some combination. Because the science is unsettled and each behavior can have many causes, the question has no clear answer.

The uncertainty complicates Chen’s feelings of resentment and responsibility. She fears that accepting her father’s account would make her past anger cruel, yet doubts that illness explains everything or can erase the harm she experienced. When she moves home during the pandemic, her mother’s advanced dementia is unmistakable: she speaks to dolls, wanders, forgets basic tasks, and becomes physically aggressive. Her father, who remembers a warmer earlier relationship and provides nearly all the care, wants to feel tenderness from Chen. She cannot summon it from memories she does not have. The essay rejects a simple choice between condemning her mother and absolving her through diagnosis, showing instead how illness can reshape the past without restoring a relationship that never felt loving.