When you live with someone who has dementia, truth often becomes irrelevant. Lying is not only a practical necessity but sometimes the only humane option.
For example, more and more Bru asks me, "Where's Cheryl?" Until recently, I've always smiled, raised my hand, and said, "I'm Cheryl!" That used to be all it took for him to be assured that I was indeed present and accounted for. Now, however, he doesn't believe me. Not always, at any rate. If I insist that I'm Cheryl, it just frustrates him and makes him increasingly fearful that something has happened to me. The only way to give him the assurance he needs is to lie.
You would think that it would come easily to me, fiction writers already having an ambiguous relationship with the truth. But it turns out I'm not a very good liar. (Exactly what a good liar would tell you. I would imagine.) Lying well requires spontaneity—improvisation—and that's never been my strong suit.
With writing, you can take time to plot and shape your lies so that they are believable. You can control your tells. In fact, you can control the whole world as long as you're willing to create it! My instinct makes me want every lie to fit into a whole. The lie needs a backstory, and it has to lead to the next scene and eventually to the end game.
Lying in real time is dynamic and interactive, and I would just hate to be caught in a lie (probably why I have a lifetime's experience telling the truth). Whether suspicious or curious, there are bound to be questions. I keep wanting my lies to have a good backstory in case I need to improvise, so that I have something to work with. But I have to fight that instinct.
Making the lie as simple as possible is the key to keeping the questions to a minimum. I have to make it an uninteresting bit of banality that leads nowhere—the exact opposite of what you want in fiction.
The thing is, whether the lie is plain or fascinating, Bru won't remember it. And he won't remember any lies I've told before. There's no way I can build a world he would recognize, however much I might want to.
I have to enter his world and respond to his questions and demands as if his perception defined reality. When he tells me I'm not Cheryl, I have to agree.
So if I'm not Cheryl, where is she?
Taking care of some business in town—depositing a check, or doing research at the library. Or else I can say, "I'm not sure. She didn't say. But she'll be back." And I've learned to add: "She asked me to stay with you until she gets back. She knows you don't like to be alone."
That makes him smile a little and relax. He says, "That's true."
He seems to interpret that little tag on the lie as meaning that Cheryl cares, that she is thinking about him, that he is loved, that he is not alone. And even if all that weren't the truth, I'd still say it, because that's what he needs to hear.