The day my 85-year-old father was pulled over by the police, it wasn’t his bad driving that startled me, it was his reaction to the police officer.As my dad grew older, whenever he would drive, I’d sit beside him in the passenger seat, clutching an invisible steering wheel, stomping on an imaginary brake and easing my foot off a gas fictitious pedal. Meanwhile, he would stare out the windshield, gesturing at the cars around him and ask, “Why is everyone driving so fast?”The speed limit on the local roads in Manchester, New Jersey, where he and my mother lived, was 25 miles an hour. No one was going over 30, but my dad was barely hitting 25.With each visit, I noticed his reflexes slowing and his impatience growing. I didn’t want him behind the wheel, but I also didn’t know how to convince him to give up driving. Besides, if he didn’t drive, who was going to chauffeur him and my mother to the grocery store, doctor’s office or their favorite Italian restaurant? It wouldn’t be me because I lived 187 miles away in Arlington, Virginia. For years, I had adopted a mostly out-of-sight, out-of-mind policy about my parents. But visions of another car plowing into my dad’s Hyundai as he ran a red light, took a turn too slowly or ignored a stop sign started to creep in along with the realization that my imaginary brake or steering wheel wouldn’t protect him.I was in the passenger seat when a cop pulled my dad over for failing to yield to another vehicle in a traffic circle. That other vehicle was the cop’s car.When a blonde, perky policewoman approached my dad’s vehicle, I expected him to turn on a bit of charm and to be deferential, just like he taught me to do years ago when I first started driving. The author’s father shuffling cards to play gin rummy in 2022. “Despite his dementia, my dad could play cards, and he would often win, up until about three months before he died,” she writes.Courtesy of Lisa Rabasca RoepeInstead of chatting up the police officer, my father turned into someone I didn’t recognize. He refused to hand over this license and registration. He sounded like a defiant toddler when he said, “I didn’t do anything wrong.” When the officer informed him that he had improperly passed her in the traffic circle, he insisted it was a two-lane road and kept muttering, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”I wanted to bridge the chasm between them, but I was at a loss. I felt tremendous loyalty to my dad — a man who worked two jobs most of his life to take care of his family and who always told me I could be anything I wanted. He’d also taught me to be polite to cops. I honestly didn’t understand why my father was being a jerk. I found his registration in the glovebox, and I convinced him to hand me his license. As I pressed the documents into the policewoman’s hand without looking at her, I whispered, “I’m sorry. He’s 85.”“That’s no excuse,” she retorted and returned to her patrol car. Years ago, my father taught me how to drive. My mom was a nervous driver, and the few times she took me out driving, she would want to come home after 10 minutes because she was scared that if we were on the road too long, we’d tempt fate and get into an accident.In comparison, my dad was always calm when I drove with him until someone would cut me off or wouldn’t allow me to change lanes. Then his reaction was to roll down the car window and yell at the other driver. Back then I trusted his driving and everything else about him. While we waited for the officer to return, I watched as my father clenched and unclenched his hands.“I want to punch that cop in the face,” he said. When the officer returned to the car, she handed him a ticket and told him he had 30 days to pay. He could appear in court to fight it, or he could just plead guilty and send in his payment. My dad was silent as she walked away. Then he rolled up his window.“I’m going to court to fight this,” he declared. “I don’t have to pay it.” Back at my parents’ house, I told my mom what happened, but she didn’t seem concerned. She waved it off and asked me to help her write the check to pay his fine. Her plan was to mail in the check and be done with it. She seemed certain he would forget about the whole incident — something I couldn’t imagine given how livid he was about the traffic ticket.The author’s parents on the day they moved from a retirement village in Manchester, New Jersey, to a senior living community in Arlington, Virginia, to live closer to the author (2021).Courtesy of Lisa Rabasca RoepeI spent the next week trying to reconcile the dad I grew up with and the dad who wanted to pick a fight with a female cop over an $85 traffic ticket. I told anyone who would listen about the incident, hoping someone could tell me why my dad suddenly became a chauvinist.Then my friend Sherry offered a possible solution, gently asking whether I considered that my dad’s bad driving and unexpected reaction to the cop could be early warning signs of dementia. She suggested that I look for more signs of confusion or agitation during my next visit.A month later, my mother and I were cleaning up the kitchen while my dad and son were playing gin rummy in the next room. Normally my dad wouldn’t talk during a card game because he wants to focus on the cards, and my son wouldn’t talk because he’s a teenager. Suddenly my dad was shouting at my son that an ace can only be used in a one, two, three sequence — never after a king. I’d been playing cards with my dad since I was a child, and an ace could always be played either way. I told my mom that something wasn’t right, but she didn’t agree with me.“Maybe his friends who play poker at the club house only use the ace as a one,” she said.I noticed that my mother always had an excuse for my dad’s unexpected behaviors. When my dad tried to pay a restaurant bill with his credit card but couldn’t sign his name, she signed the receipt. When I showed my dad a childhood photo of him, his brother, sister and their mother and he didn’t recognize anyone, including himself, my mom blamed the quality of the photo. When my dad asked why I didn’t ever bring my dog Lambic to visit anymore, my mother insisted my dad simply forgot my dog had died five years ago.When I suggested my mother describe these incidents to their doctor and ask if my dad should be tested, she asked, “Tested for what?”Not able to say the word dementia, I whispered, “Memory issues.” My suggestion was met with anger, and my mother spit out, “And what will the test prove?” Silently I listed everything I had been thinking about for the last year: A diagnosis could be used to convince my dad to stop driving, persuade my mom to get help taking care of him and encourage my parents to move to Arlington. I was beginning to understand that it wasn’t safe for anyone — not my dad, my mom, other passengers, other drivers or pedestrians — when my dad was behind the wheel.Persuading my dad to stop driving was easier than convincing my mother that something was wrong with my dad. Even with a doctor’s diagnosis of dementia, my mom refused to believe anything needed to change. She insisted my dad failed the cognitive test because he never finished high school. The author and her father on his 91st birthday in 2023. "This is the last photo we ever took together," she writes.Courtesy of Lisa Rabasca RoepeA few months later, my dad told me that he didn’t enjoy driving anymore. Everyone in the Shop Rite parking lot drives too fast and they’re so impatient, he told me. “They don’t give you a chance,” he said. I listened with empathy, nodding my head and pressing my lips together to show concern. When he was finished complaining about the other drivers, I told him he didn’t have to drive anymore if he didn’t want to, that my mom could drive, that I would always drive when I came to visit, that I would visit more often, and maybe one day he and my mom would move to Arlington so I could drive him everywhere. Three years later, they moved to a senior community a 15-minute walk from my house in Arlington. By then, it was hard to ignore my father’s mental decline — his vocabulary was reduced to just a few words, he needed help with everyday tasks, and my mother was showing signs of exhaustion. Still, she resisted any outside help until one morning when she called me in a panic. She had fallen overnight on her way to the bathroom, and she hadn’t been wearing her Life Alert pendant. Although she called for my father to help her, he didn’t respond. In the morning when he came out of the bedroom and found her on the floor, she asked him for the telephone, but he didn’t understand what she wanted or why she couldn’t get up. When he finally handed her the phone, she had been lying there for at least five hours. While my mother was in the hospital recovering from hip surgery, my husband and I took turns taking care of my dad. We suddenly realized my mother wasn’t in denial about my dad’s diagnosis. She had been protecting him and spent the last few years quietly managing his symptoms. Taking care of him was now a full-time job. Before my mother came home from the hospital, we arranged for my father to move into memory care at the same senior community where they lived so she could be with him but without the burden of managing his care.I expected her to be angry when I told her the plan, but she was relieved. I realized then that her refusal to admit my father was changing wasn’t just her being stubborn. She was scared. She didn’t want to accept that anything was wrong because that meant their life would have to change. I was beginning to understand that I couldn’t control my father’s decline or my mother’s reaction to it any more than I could control my father’s driving with an imaginary steering wheel or brake. What I could control was how much time I spent with my parents. Rather than focus on all the ways my father had changed, I looked for glimmers of the dad I grew up with. He still loved listening to Frank Sinatra and playing gin rummy. Most nights before dinner, I would stop by, and we would listen to music and play cards. It wasn’t the relationship I grew up with, but it was the one we had now, and I was learning that was enough. My father spent the last two years of his life in memory care. Watching him move deeper into dementia is one of the hardest things I’ve ever been through, but instead of feeling sorry for him or myself, I spent that time focusing on the things I could control. I would visit him at least three times a week, and when he lost his ability to play gin rummy, I invented a collaborative card game for us to play. When we celebrated his 91st birthday with cake and ice cream, he might not have understood the reason for the celebration, but he knew it was all about him. My father died two weeks after this 91st birthday. His journey taught me that life doesn’t always turn out the way you expect or even plan, and while that can be difficult, you can still find meaning in the space between what you hoped for and what is. I used to think that love meant being able to fix things or protecting the people you care about, but this isn’t a Hollywood movie. Life doesn’t always give you a happy ending. So, I spent as much time as I could with my father, and I tried to be the best daughter I could be. It was the very least I could do.Lisa Rabasca Roepe is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Fast Company, Wired, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, Marketplace, and Ms. Magazine. Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch at pitch@huffpost.com.