"i will light your darkness with confusion" ...

and that was exactly what it felt like, caring for my father with alzheimer's disease for over a year. as the disease progressed, everything fell into a darkness that was totally confused. if he understood me, he often didn't say so. if i asked him anything, he almost always replied that he didn't know. and, i have to say, the thing that threw me the most was that here i was trying to communicate with someone who had always been perfectly rational and i just couldn't get my head around the fact that he appeared to make no sense anymore. towards the end i started to twig that even if he did understand me, he just wasn't able to translate that understanding into actions. and, even if he said he didn't know, somewhere at a deeper inaccessible level there was a reason for what he did. i have to say that i remain deeply saddened that i didn't realise these things sooner. my father's parting gift to me was to get me to understand that i didn't understand.

Did you get along well before he was ill, if I'm not prying?