The phone call I didn’t know I was making

There’s a 2018 paper out of UC Davis that describes something called compensation. The short version: older adults who are starting to feel their cognition slip will, often years before anyone notices, begin quietly deploying strategies to hide it. Lists. Rehearsed phrases. Gentle redirections toward familiar ground. The interesting finding, the one that stayed with me, is that the people most actively performing competence are usually the ones who still have enough of it left to perform.

I didn’t go looking for that study. I went looking for it after a phone call with my dad.

He’s seventy one, lives in Melbourne, and we speak every couple of weeks. Last Sunday he called to tell me about a property he was thinking of selling. Standard stuff. The kind of conversation we’ve had a thousand times. About two minutes in, he asked me a question I’d already answered ninety seconds earlier. He laughed, said “anyway,” and kept going. A moment later, he paused for slightly too long before the next sentence. And then, in a voice I’d never quite heard before, he performed the rest of the call.

I don’t know how else to describe it. He performed being sharp. He performed remembering. He performed the role of the father who’s always had one hand on the wheel of whatever we were discussing. It was beautifully done. If I hadn’t been paying close attention, I wouldn’t have noticed.

I hung up and sat on my balcony in District 2 for about forty minutes, watching the Saigon River go past, not doing anything.

Because I had recognised the performance. I’d recognised it because I used to do the exact same one, about fifteen years ago, when I was a young man pretending to be an adult.

What the research actually describes

There’s a specific term in the gerontology literature for what my dad was doing on that call. It’s called compensation. A 2018 study describes compensation strategies as behaviours aimed at mitigating or adapting to loss. Older adults employ them proactively, often long before anyone around them notices anything is amiss. Lists. Rehearsed phrases. Routines that run on rails. Gentle redirections of conversation toward ground they know well.

The researchers, led by Sarah Tomaszewski Farias, found that cognitively normal older adults and those with mild cognitive impairment actually use more compensation strategies than people with advanced dementia. The implication is quietly devastating. Compensation works best when the person still has enough function to deploy it. The people most actively performing competence are often the ones who are becoming aware, privately, that they are losing it.

A separate 2019 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition went further. Using computational modelling, the researchers showed that older adults under high cognitive load strategically reallocate their resources to preserve apparent performance. They execute decisions more slowly than younger adults, but through compensatory shifts, they keep accuracy surprisingly high. From the outside, nothing looks wrong. On the inside, the machine is working harder to produce the same output.

That is what I heard on the call with my dad.

Why this is the hardest part

People will tell you the physical decline is the hardest part of watching a parent age. The stoop. The slower walk. The way they don’t quite finish the chore they started.

For me, it isn’t. The physical decline is visible and therefore nameable. You can talk about a bad knee. You can buy a better chair. The language exists, the family adapts, everyone agrees on what’s happening.

The harder part is the one nobody talks about, because it doesn’t have the same vocabulary. It’s the moment you realise your parent has started performing competence. Not because they are incompetent. They are almost certainly fine. But because they have started to notice, quietly, that their machinery is not quite what it was, and they are mounting an elegant, effortful act to keep the people they love from seeing it.

Here is why this is so disorienting. You recognise the performance because you used to be the one doing it.

The mirror nobody wants

When I was twenty two, I performed adulthood for everybody who would watch. I performed it at work. I performed it at dinner parties with older colleagues. I performed it on the phone with my father, reporting on a job I was barely keeping. I used the same tools my dad was using on the phone last Sunday. Rehearsed phrases. Confident transitions. A cover of briskness over the parts where I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing.

Children perform adulthood because they haven’t arrived yet. Parents, at a certain age, perform adulthood because they can feel themselves beginning to leave it. The two performances are, in structural terms, almost identical. You’re borrowing a competence you don’t quite feel, to protect the people around you from having to notice.

The mirror is what gets me.

For most of my life, my father was the solid thing I measured myself against. Watching him quietly adopt the same coping strategies I used at twenty two is the moment the direction of the relationship starts to reverse. Not legally or practically, not yet. Emotionally. The person who used to be unambiguously in charge is now, in small ways, managing his image with me the way I used to manage mine with him.

What the caregiving literature gets right, and wrong

Most of the literature on aging parents talks about role reversal in logistical terms. Who pays the bills, who drives whom to appointments, who holds the power of attorney. A qualitative study published in Innovation in Aging, by Toyokawa and colleagues, captured something closer to the real dynamic. They interviewed sixteen adult children in their fifties about role reversal with their own parents, and found that parents were strategically managing information to maintain autonomy. They withheld symptoms. They concealed medication use. They avoided conversations about death preparation.

The researchers framed this as information control. I’d call it the same thing I’m describing here, just measured from the outside. Our parents are not being dishonest. They are doing what we did at twenty two, which is to curate the edges of what we share so the people we love don’t see the wobble underneath.

The caregiving literature tells you how to handle the wobble. It rarely tells you how to handle the heartbreak of recognising that the wobble is there at all.

The Buddhist framing that helps

In Pali Buddhism there is a concept called anicca, impermanence. It’s one of the three marks of existence. Everything that arises will pass. The Buddha was particularly clear that this applies not just to physical bodies but to the mental formations we build our sense of reality around. The unchanging father. The solid parent. The permanent version of the people who raised us. None of these things were ever going to last. We just built our emotional architecture as though they would.

I wrote about this in my book Hidden Secrets of Buddhism: How To Live With Maximum Impact and Minimum Ego, but I don’t think I understood it properly until this year. Watching my father begin to compensate, and recognising the compensation from the inside because I’d done it myself, collapsed a version of him I’d been unconsciously relying on. Not collapsed, exactly. Corrected.

My father is a person. He always was. Just like me, and just like my daughter one day, he is occasionally going to feel his hand slip on the wheel and he is going to cover it. This isn’t a pathology. It’s what humans do when they love the people around them.

What I’m trying to do with this

I called my dad back on Monday night. I didn’t say anything about the performance. I wouldn’t, and I don’t think I should. Naming it explicitly would be a small cruelty, and his dignity matters more than my desire for honest conversation.

What I did do was something I hadn’t done before. I went slower. I didn’t test him with quick questions. I let him circle back to topics without flagging that he’d already covered them. I gave him the space I used to wish my parents and my older colleagues had given me when I was twenty two and performing so desperately.

Here’s the part I’m still sitting with, though. The moment you start holding that space for a parent, you’ve already lost them a little. Not in the big obvious way. In the small private way where you’ve silently agreed, without ever saying it out loud, that you’re the one managing the room now. They don’t know you’ve made that agreement. You’re not sure when you made it either. But it’s made.

Honestly, I don’t know what you gain in that trade. Maybe a different kind of closeness. Maybe just the uncomfortable knowledge that you’re capable of protecting the person who used to protect you, and that the capability itself is the thing nobody prepares you for. My dad raised a son who can now, apparently, pretend not to notice things on his behalf. That’s the skill I inherited. I’m not sure yet whether to be grateful for it or not.