In the spring of 2018, I received a Facebook-friend request from an imposter—someone pretending to be my father. At least, that’s what I thought. The profile used my dad’s photos, but his name was spelled incorrectly. I reported it and went on with my life.

Less than a month later, my dad was diagnosed with dementia. At first, my sister and I didn’t think much about his social-media use; we were busy worrying about his new tendency to elope—the term for when dementia patients wander away from their confines or, driven by anxiety or confusion, attempt to escape. (Once, he stole back the car keys we had hidden to keep him from driving off; twice, he simply bought a new car.) But then we noticed his Facebook profile. Though it was the one he’d long been using, with his name spelled correctly, he’d been sending odd messages, starting seemingly random group chats, and sharing the same thing over and over. One day, he posted three different memes three times each and three others six times each, all within the same hour. We realized the fake profile had, in fact, been very real—it was an additional account my father had made by mistake. It had only been the start.

My father’s cognitive decline had an audience of almost everyone we knew, many of whom didn’t know about his diagnosis. Were his friends confused or worried? we wondered. More important: Would the clear-minded version of him who existed before his dementia want to appear this way online? We didn’t think so. Yet the one who existed right in front of us wanted connection, and he seemed to be pulled to social media. And the more he reached out to people—however strangely, purposefully or not—the more we realized that his reality didn’t need to be concealed.

[Read: How people with dementia make sense of the world]

When my dad joined Facebook, almost a decade before his dementia diagnosis, he wasn’t impressed with the platform. I remember him commenting on a status I had posted, to my embarrassment: “Facebook seems like a huge waste of time.” Eventually, though, he discovered friends with whom he’d gone to high school in Beirut. He hadn’t connected with them in years, and they were scattered across the world—but now he could interact with them.

Then, in 2018, he began forgetting things. “Where are you two going?” he asked one day as I grabbed my mother’s purse from the living room. “Mom has a doctor’s appointment,” I said. A few minutes later, when I rolled her wheelchair into the living room to go pull up the car, he looked at us, surprised. “Where are you two going?”  

In the last six months of his life, dementia made my father deeply anxious and afraid to be alone. If I told him I was going for a 20-minute walk, he’d panic and call me five minutes later. One evening, after I’d spent the whole day caring for him and my mom, who was also terminally ill, I was desperate to pass out in my bed for just a few hours—but he wanted me to sleep on the sofa in his room. All night, he kept the lights and the TV on, pressing buttons to move his power recliner every five minutes. He’d always been the most independent person I knew, but now he couldn’t sit still or pass the night without company.

That sense of restlessness is common for people with dementia. They often have the feeling of wanting to go home even when they are home, which is one reason they might elope. And the feeling of loneliness, too, is not unusual; even those who aren’t physically isolated in care facilities probably struggle to keep up with friends. The pandemic, which began roughly two years after my dad’s diagnosis, didn’t help. Studies suggest that social-distancing restrictions took a major toll on many people with dementia.

[Read: What if this was the last year your loved one was lucid?]

My father’s social-media use reflected his constant state of agitation. He’d ping me endlessly on Facebook—often sending repeated chain-message-type warnings, like one cautioning that women had died after inhaling a free perfume sample they’d received in the mail. But his frenetic posting also seemed to soothe him in real life; it gave him an outlet for his nervous energy, and a sense of being linked to other people.

Still, I felt anxious about his more public online activity. Some people reacted with bewilderment; on one post, a friend from Beirut wrote, “Too confusing. Incomplete sentences.” It would have taken too much effort to privately and tactfully alert every one of his friends of his situation. So we just let him continue to use social media, assuming that people would eventually ignore his posts.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, people seemed to recognize that he wasn’t well. And instead of disappearing, they were mostly just concerned, and loving, and glad to still be connected to him. Once, about a month before my dad died, he video-called me through Facebook—something he had never done before, so I could tell it was a mistake. “I know you didn’t mean to, but I’m glad you called,” I said. “Did you know you added six other people to this call?” He didn’t. “Well,” I told him, “we might have some visitors joining.”

One friend joined from North Carolina and talked with him for a few minutes. Before he hung up, he shared how much my dad meant to him. Then a friend who was driving through the mountains of Lebanon joined. “I love this man. I love your dad,” he said. “He’s like a father to me.” My dad still had faint bruises on his face from a fall on concrete a few weeks earlier, after which he’d had to get staples in his head. “It’s good to see that you’re doing better,” his friend said. He never would have seen this had my father not accidentally called.

[Read: How dementia locks people inside their pain]

Another time, I found that my dad had created a large group message. Because he was a natural-born leader—president of every group he’d ever joined—and categorically outspoken, the 50 or so people added, most of whom did not know he had dementia, were waiting to see what he had to say. The chat consisted of his friends in Beirut, friends living in other Middle Eastern or European countries, and friends across the United States—from Georgia, Michigan, Tennessee. I was anxious about what he might send.

But after several hours with no word from my dad, someone in the group sent a wave. Other members, not knowing one another, followed suit. Eventually, if I scrolled down, there were tens of people in this newly formed group, just quietly saying hello. I think often about that chat, which still exists, however inactive—a whole network of friends, waving forever.

Dementia patients are so often hidden, whether in facilities away from their communities or more subtly—by people like me, keeping private the thoughts and behaviors of our loved ones that make us uncomfortable. That impulse, I believe, is often well intentioned; we just don’t know what people will think. Perhaps we also don’t want to tarnish the image of our loved one that members of their circle once had. But watching my dad’s friends react to his online activity, I realized I should have had a little more faith in their care for him, and the persistence of that care even when he didn’t seem like himself anymore.

And while my dad’s social-media use revealed how profoundly he had changed, it also gave me glimpses of my old father, still there, somewhere within him. The last Facebook status he wrote before entering the hospital for the very last time read “Bravo air fryer” with a 1-800 number. He’d seen the product advertised on TV, and posted the number when he meant to just write it down. Though he’d once loved to cook—he’d even briefly owned and run a restaurant—he hadn’t been able to in at least a year. “What am I still living for?” he’d recently asked as I was putting his shirt and shoes on him; he could only walk a few steps with his walker before feeling exhausted.

He’d lost so much of what gave him a sense of identity. And yet, that post made me realize that he hadn’t lost all of it. My dad was still my dad. He wanted to air-fry something.