Chantal Patenaude’s It IS What It Is: Walking Beside My Mother Through Dementia offers a steady, compassionate, and unvarnished account of dementia from someone who has lived the experience directly.
After decades of living and working abroad, Patenaude returned to Canada expecting a quieter, more connected chapter of life. She convinced her widowed, seventy‑nine‑year‑old mom to relocate from California to Ottawa, imagining a simple, peaceful routine built around family. What she encountered instead was the beginning of a profound shift — subtle changes in language, behaviour, and personality that soon led to a diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia (FTD).
Patenaude’s memoir, It IS What It Is, traces that transformation with honesty and restraint. She writes from the inside of the experience, capturing the moment a daughter becomes a caregiver and the emotional recalibration that follows.
The book doesn’t sensationalize dementia, nor does it reduce it to clinical terms. Instead, Patenaude focuses on the lived reality: the daily adjustments, the heartbreak of progressive decline, and the small, intentional acts of love that continue to matter.
One of the most touching threads is her personal vow — to make her mother smile during every visit, no matter how the disease evolves.
What distinguishes this memoir is the way Patenaude handles the erosion of language. FTD often presents differently from the dementia most readers are familiar with, and she documents how communication changes first, reshaping the relationship in unexpected ways. The result is a portrait of caregiving that is both devastating and rewarding, marked by loss but also by what remains.
It IS What It Is is not a manual; it’s a compass. Patenaude offers readers a grounded, compassionate guide to the emotional terrain families navigate when dementia enters their lives. For readers — many of whom are supporting ageing parents or confronting similar diagnoses — her story provides perspective, reassurance, and a reminder that connection can endure even as memory fades.
It IS What It Is: Walking Beside My Mother Through Dementia is available for purchase on the author’s website, https://chantalpatenaude.com/ and at your favourite online book retailer.
