Miklos has always been an extremely modest about his body and bodily functions. He has closed the shade on the slider so that people walking around the ponds behind our townhouse can’t look into the dining room and see him eating in his pajamas. We hadn’t even been in the bathroom at the same time until we had been married for many years. But this past week, I was shocked to see that he had gone downstairs stark naked to use the toilet in the powder room rather than the upstairs bathroom.

I was using the sink and vanity counter upstairs, but it would have been very easy to step into the shower/toilet section and close the connecting door. That would certainly have been more modest than traipsing through the house, with the shade on the glider halfway open.

The next day, he didn’t close the glider shade while he was eating breakfast in his pajamas, but without his bathrobe. Certainly not as radical as parading naked, but still a change of behavior. Those are only two instances, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will continue. Losing filters is a common enough symptom. It certainly bears close watching.

So far, it hasn’t affected his conversation, as it does with many older people, even without dementia. He doesn’t say everything that enters his mind. He is unfailingly kind in his speech. I have mused before that perhaps people simply become more of themselves as they age, rather than necessarily becoming meaner.

I am very hopeful that the two events of the past week, when Miklos was less than modest, are anomalies and not the beginning of more radical decline.