Leong Jui Chuan, a travel agent based in Shah Alam, was not looking for healing when her father’s dementia began. She was just trying to manage it, and what she found along the way surprised her.
In a post shared in Dementia Group Malaysia on Facebook, Jui Chuan wrote about caring for her father, Leong Choong Mun, 83, who has been living with dementia since 2023.
The post, later picked up by Sinar Harian, resonated widely because it was not simply a story about a difficult experience.
It was about what an unexpected kind of grace can emerge from one.
He worked until he was 80
Leong Choong Mun worked as a secretary for a Chinese traders’ association until he was 80 years old. After developing cataracts, he underwent surgery but his eyesight did not fully recover because the nerves in his eyes had already deteriorated.
Unable to read or write he eventually had to stop working.
“After he stopped working, he had no direction and stayed at home every day. His brain became less active, and that was when his dementia started getting worse,” Jui Chuan wrote.
He can still walk and eat without assistance, but he needs constant reassurance about where he is, what time it is, what day it is and what they are doing that day. On harder days, he becomes disoriented and searches through the house looking for things he cannot name. On one occasion, he climbed over the fence and wandered outside until someone found him and brought him to a police station.
How they spend their days now
Jui Chuan, who is married and lives elsewhere, makes the effort to return every other day. Whenever she can, she brings him to a coffee shop or a park so he can be around people and experience a change of scenery. At home, the family keeps him engaged with board games, puzzles, UNO, stacking games and simple maths and spelling exercises.
They ask him to count money, answer questions about the day and speak in other languages he knows, all of it aimed at keeping his mind as active as possible.
When she took him on the LRT3 recently, she wrote about it not as a milestone but as an ordinary day. A father and daughter riding the train together.
The kind of thing that only becomes remarkable when you understand how much effort it takes.
Three months of cleaning his room
One of the unexpected outcomes of her father’s condition was that the family was finally able to clear his room. He had always kept an excessive amount of belongings, but dementia had stripped away his attachment to physical things. Seeing that he no longer remembered or cared about what he owned, the family spent three months sorting through everything, discarding what was broken or unused and giving him a tidier, more spacious place to live.
“We were able to release the bad energy that came from the hoarding,” she wrote.
His condition helped the family heal
What Jui Chuan had not planned to write about, but did was what else the process made room for. Her parents’ relationship had not always been a peaceful one when she was growing up. There were memories she had carried for years, the kind that do not leave on their own.
“My father’s dementia has allowed us to forgive the negative things that happened to our family when we were young,” she wrote.
“I forgave the unhappy memories, forgave myself, and it was actually healing for everyone.”
She also left something for anyone reading who is still carrying their own version of those years. “When you’re young, think, speak and do good things. Because when you grow old, those things may repeat themselves without you realising it.”
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Read also: ‘I gave up my family to pursue my dreams’ Shares 34 YO M’sian woman – In Real Life
https://inreallife.my/i-gave-up-my-family-to-pursue-my-dreams-shares-34-yo-msian-woman/
‘I gave up my family to pursue my dreams’ Shares 34 YO M’sian woman
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