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JUNE MARKS THREE years since my mum passed from complications of vascular dementia. It was a tough couple of years, watching her mind slowly fail and her world shrink a little more with each passing month. Anyone who has cared for a loved one in the late stages of dementia will know how difficult and disjointed even the simplest conversation becomes. The loops, the confusion, the frustration of trying to redirect someone you love from a thought they can no longer find their way out of.
Mum had been comfortable, if lonely, in retirement. She was a widow for twenty-five years, and she often said with genuine surprise in her voice that she was better off financially than at any other point in her life. Not having to worry about money was a relief she never took for granted. But here’s the thing: she never really thought about money either.
She wasn’t driven by possessions or status. She had what she needed, she was grateful, and she got on with living. Money was background noise to her, not the tune she danced to.
What surprised me most came in her final year, when she was deeply confused and often entirely detached from reality. Among all the things her mind could have snagged on, the one conversation loop she returned to with unsettling clarity was money. She was convinced she had none. It made her anxious in a way that was painful to witness, a raw, childlike insecurity that seemed to rise from somewhere far deeper than conscious thought.
I would reassure her, calmly and repeatedly, that her savings were healthy and there was absolutely nothing to worry about. I would joke about her bank balance making me jealous and she needed to go on a shopping spree. Sometimes it settled her. Often it didn’t last more than a few minutes before the worry surfaced again.
The memory care unit understandably discouraged residents from keeping personal cash, but I often broke that rule. Whenever I visited and could see that familiar agitation building, I’d press a few low value bills into her hand. Nothing significant, just the texture of something real. It worked in a way that words alone couldn’t compete with.
She’d look down at the money, close her fingers around it, and the tension would ease from her shoulders. She felt safe again, at least for a little while. Although, we often moved on to worrying about finding a purse to stash the bills in.
For a woman who gave so little thought to money and nothing to status, I found it striking, strange even, that financial anxiety was what surfaced when the rational layers of her mind were stripped away. It made me think about what dementia actually reveals. It doesn’t invent fears, it sometimes uncovers them. The fog clears away the learned, the sophisticated, the socially conditioned, and leaves something older and more fundamental underneath.
At the time, I read up on this anxiety, there’s some neuroscience behind it. Emotional memory, the kind wired to survival and feeling rather than fact, is stored differently in the brain and tends to be far more resilient. Dementia strips back the rational layers first. What it sometimes leaves behind is older, deeper, and harder to reach.
In my mum’s case, that something was the primal need to feel secure. She had grown up shaped by post-war austerity, widowhood, and years of careful budgeting on a single income. She would have been a young woman when rationing finally ended. In the world she grew up in, money wasn’t abstract: it was coal for the fire and food on the table, shoes that lasted another winter without needing replacing.
I think that connection between having and feeling safe wasn’t a conclusion she’d reasoned her way to. It was lived, year after year, until it settled somewhere beneath thought entirely. Security and money had become inseparable, written into her long before she ever had reason to question it.
I’ve thought about this a lot since we lost her. The concept of financial security isn’t just something we think about, it seems to be something we feel, right down in the oldest parts of ourselves. It runs beneath logic, beneath personality, beneath even memory. My mum could and did forget my name on a bad day, but she could not shake the feeling that not having money meant not being safe.
That instinct had been laid down so early and reinforced so consistently across a lifetime that dementia, for all its cruelty, couldn’t fully reach it. To me, it says something profound about how deeply rooted our relationship with money really is. It seems to be wrapped around the core of our being.
Losing my mum the way I did, piece by piece and conversation by conversation, was one of the hardest things I’ve been through. But in the heartbreak, she gave me this unexpected insight, pressed into my mind just as firmly as I had secretly pressed those bills into hers. Beneath everything we build and believe and become, there are feelings so fundamental they outlast nearly everything else.
She reminded me that understanding our relationship with money isn’t just a financial exercise, it’s a deeply human one. Maybe it goes some way to explaining why we make choices that are sometimes irrational. And she did it, characteristically, without ever meaning to teach me a thing.
Mark Crothers is a retired small business owner from the UK with a keen interest in personal finance and simple living. Married to his high school sweetheart, with daughters and grandchildren, he knows the importance of building a secure financial future. With an aversion to social media, he prefers to spend his time on his main passions: reading, scratch cooking, racket sports, and hiking.
As a volunteer assisting retired individuals with financial decision-making. I can feel their anxiety despite my repeated encouragement.
I agree that fear of running out of money surfaces even among those who may never have worried in the past.
One major change that is obvious to me from my personal and family experiences is that retirement is a relatively new phenomenon in America.
My dad was born in 1916 and passed in 1969, at age 53. Mom was born in 1924, came to America in 1925, worked two jobs after dad died from 1970 – 1989, became disabled at age 64, lived an illness filled, mostly sedentary disability retirement, and passed in 2001, at age 76. One had no retirement, the other’s “retirement” …
One reason for anxiety, the fear of running out of money among the old/retired, may arise from concerns from the exhaustion of what is often our most precious asset – the ability to earn a wage – where anxiety may arise from concerns about being unable to resume employment – whether due to ageism, physical ability, etc.
Thanks Mark for sharing your dementia experiences and money. I must admit, at 80 years old I feel we have enough and it is time to spend, it is OK. I still watch the stock market daily though, probably make no more than one trade a year, and if I do, I purchase the S&P500 with any equity cash. Definitely I just may be like your Mum.
My mom had dementia but passed from another malady before it became too severe. Although there was no need to be concerned, she often worried about money. Born in 1916, the great depression and scarcity of goods during World War II had a profound effect on her childhood and young adult years.
Thanks for this article, it deepens my understanding of dementia, and may help others who are caring for their loved ones.
Your article resonates deeply with me as I am going through something similar at the moment with my mother. A family friend, John Suchet, wrote a book called My Bonnie, How dementia stole the love of my life. A powerful story which has prepared me for what I am going through now.
Nicely written. Dementia is heart-breaking. Jonathan used to argue that just having money could bring happiness. I think that’s true, and that it comes not from thinking of the extras money can buy us, but knowing we’ll have the basics we hardly think about. It means that we can be fed, clothed and sheltered. Knowing those primary needs are covered satisfies a deep source of anxiety.
Thanks for these thoughts. Our parents’ generation who lived through great financial uncertainty learned to save and not spend. My father was very demented in his 90s. He did now know my mother, his wife, or me, his daughter. Despite the dementia, every few weeks he would ask about the interest rate on his CDs and when the next CD would mature! Sometime he would mention the glory days of double digit CD rates. We always used these discussion to reassure him of his ample fiscal resources and remind him their financial well-being was due to their saving over many years.
Thank you Mark for this poignant lesson on the trauma of money. I work with parents affected by inter personal violence and money is often a weapon, before and after relationship breakdown. Children in these homes feel lessons in money too. I am glad your mother had the opportunity, if not the memory, of being cared for financially. I highly recommend Chantel Chapman’s book The Trauma of Money for those who would like to learn more about how money builds a sense of security and identity. As she states, trauma in any area of our lives can impact our relationship with finances.
What an incredible story. I love that we can now all learn something from your mom. Also a great reminder to listen to the worries of those we care for, even if they seem irrational… it is real to them.
I’m so sorry for your loss. My grandmother passed away 10 years ago for VD also, and she had worries about money as well. When people start losing everything familiar–their home, their car, their independence, their health and finally their mind–money could be something external for focus that fear on. I’m glad she had a loving caretaker in you at the end.