This is my mother, Beth, with my wife, Chava. The photo was taken this past Sunday, on Mother's Day.

It was also the first time my mother met Chava.

They have met many times before. My mother has Alzheimer's disease, and every visit is a new introduction. The recognition resets. So does the first-time joy.

We talk a lot in this field about the hard parts of dementia: the grief, the disorientation, the moments when someone you love is looking right at you and reaching for a name they can no longer find. Those moments are real and they should not be minimized.

But there is another half of this, and it does not get talked about enough.

My mother got to meet Chava on Sunday. She got to see the person who makes me happy. She got to know, fresh and uncomplicated, that her son is loved and that he loves someone back. She has gotten to have that moment more than once, because the recognition resets. The first-time joy is available to her again and again.

That is not nothing. That is, in fact, a kind of grace most of us do not get.

I think about this a lot in the work I do with senior living operators. We train caregivers to manage dementia. We rarely train them to look for the joy that lives alongside the difficulty. Both are present, every single day, in every community in this country. The caregiver who is taught to find the joy will deliver care that families remember for the rest of their lives. The caregiver who is taught only to manage the decline burns out fast.

Here is what I want to name, because I think the move has a name.

Improvisational theater has a foundational rule called "Yes, And." When your scene partner offers you something, you accept it and you build on it. You don't say no. You don't correct them. You don't pull them back into your version of what should be happening. You meet them where they are, and you go from there.

That is exactly what I did on Sunday.

My mother said hello to Chava the way you say hello to someone you've just met. She did not remember the other visits she has made over the past few years. I had a choice. I could have done what most of us are trained to do: corrected her, reminded her, reoriented her to facts she could no longer reach. I could have watched her face fall as she tried to locate something that was no longer there. Or I could let it be new.

I let it be new.

This is "Yes, And" applied to dementia care. The reality your loved one is in is the reality you work with. You don't drag them into yours. You meet them in theirs, and you build from there.

Most caregivers are not taught this. They are taught reality orientation: correcting, reminding, anchoring to dates and names and facts. And in mid-to-late stage dementia, the research is clear that reality orientation increases distress rather than reducing it. The reason is mechanical. When you ask someone to retrieve a memory their brain can no longer access, their brain generates a distress signal around the absence. You haven't reminded them of something. You've put them in a situation where they can only fail, and they've felt it.

"Yes, And" removes that demand. It doesn't ask your loved one to retrieve memories that can’t be accessed. It asks you to enter the present they are actually living in. From there, the joy is available. So is the work of caregiving that doesn't burn the caregiver to the ground.

This is part of why I do what I do. My mom is somebody's resident. So is yours, or someone you love. They deserve people around them who are trained to see the whole picture, not just the hard half of it. There is still joy to be had.

*****

What I just described is the easy version of "Yes, And." Meeting Chava again was a joyful moment to step into. There was nothing in me that wanted to correct my mother. The principle did its own work.

The hard version is different. It's when your loved one is asking where her mother is, and her mother has been dead for thirty years. It's when she's refusing a bath she actually needs. It's when she wants to go home, and she is home. It's when she's asked you what time dinner is for the fifth time in an hour and you can feel your patience going.

In those moments, reality orientation is the trained instinct. It is also, almost always, the wrong move.

I wrote a short guide called Evening at the Improv: Using the "Yes, And" Showbiz Formula. Five scenarios. In each one, the exact response most caregivers reach for first, and the exact "Yes, And" response that works better. Scripts you can read, adapt, and use tonight.

Five dollars. Get the scripts.

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