I worked alongside Beverly for several years. There was a running joke around the office: what does Beverly actually do? Nobody had a satisfying answer. She forgot conversations. Plans that weren't her idea had a way of failing. She was difficult to work with in ways that, at the time, I attributed to personality.
Beverly passed away from Alzheimer's. Her obituary dates the onset of her dementia back to when she was still working — still being promoted, still being given more responsibility. And I keep thinking about what I missed. The forgotten conversations. The inability to follow through. At the time I read them as incompetence. Looking back, I wonder how much of what frustrated me about Beverly was actually the beginning of something nobody was willing to name.
That's what I think about when families tell me their parent has "changed." Sometimes the change is the beginning of something nobody has named yet.
Medical Causes — When the Brain Itself Changes
The most important thing to understand about personality change in elderly parents is that it can be a symptom of a medical condition rather than simply a response to circumstances. Dementia affects personality and behavior — the frontal lobe changes associated with Alzheimer's and other dementias reduce impulse control, filter inhibitions, and alter emotional regulation. A parent who was always even-tempered can become irritable. A parent who was always careful can become impulsive.
This isn't character deterioration. It's neurological change. The person you knew is still in there — the disease is affecting the expression of who they are. If personality changes are significant, sudden, or escalating, a cognitive evaluation is the right first step before any other response.
Depression also changes people dramatically and is both common and underdiagnosed in elderly adults. Withdrawal, loss of engagement, irritability — all can look like personality change when they are actually treatable depression.
Life Circumstances — When the World Changes Around Them
Loss of Purpose and Role
Rayford had been in ministry for decades. He knew who he was in that context — respected, needed, with a clear role. When that ended badly, the identity structure that had organized his life collapsed. What looked like bitterness and selfishness was also disorientation. Without the work, without the role, he didn't entirely know who he was.
Grief and Loss Accumulation
By their seventies, most people have lost parents, many friends, possibly a spouse. Grief that accumulates without resolution can change a person's fundamental affect and engagement with life in ways that look like personality but are actually unprocessed loss.
Role Reversal and Loss of Control
A parent who spent fifty years as the decision-maker, the provider, the person others depended on — now being driven to appointments, having their medications managed, being told what they should and shouldn't do — is experiencing profound identity disruption. The resistance and rigidity that families read as stubbornness is often a person asserting the last available pieces of agency.
What Doesn't Change
People's fundamental character — their core values, their deepest loves, the things that have mattered to them all their lives — tends to persist even when everything else changes. Beverly's father, sitting in our office after he'd wandered in, talked about how proud he was of his daughter. He didn't remember much. He remembered that. When your parent changes, look for what hasn't. The part that hasn't changed is still the person you love. Work from there.
About Chip Mitchell
Chip Mitchell is the founder of Growing Gray USA. With over a decade of experience owning a home care company, he has helped hundreds of families navigate the complexities of caring for aging parents.
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