[speeder]

Dementia is definitely not telling the same stories over and over again. That's just a sign of someone with limited material in their hard drive who always wants to share. We have people here who have been telling the same 4 or 5 stories for 20 years. I have a friend who has been doing it since he was young...we started holding up fingers to indicate how many times he's already told the current story. At least that made it mildly amusing.

I've unfortunately had plenty of experience with real dementia in my family, all on my mom's side. It's like a bad acid trip where my mother, for instance, thinks that she was still married to my father instead of her current husband at the time of ~40 years. She got mad at him and threatened him that her husband is a lawyer when she was actually talking to her husband, not the lawyer she divorced 50 years ago. That would be one of the milder stories of complete break from reality that dementia patients suffer from. We would have been over the moon grateful if she simply told boring stories repeatedly, the dementia killed her in a relatively short time.

Getting forgetful is not dementia, it's simply getting old.