What Watermelon Taught Us About Knowing Someone

It came up in the middle of a menu planning conversation. Not a profound moment — just a practical one, the kind that happens dozens of times a week in care settings. We were talking through what worked for her husband and what didn’t, and she mentioned it almost in passing.

If he took a bite of something that didn’t sit right with him, she’d follow it immediately with watermelon. His favourite. It reset him. Made him forget the bad bite. Let the meal continue.

She didn’t read that in a book. No care protocol handed it to her. She found it the way you find things when you love someone and pay close attention to them for a very long time.

What struck me wasn’t the watermelon. It was what we did with it next. We took what she told us and built it into his care plan. Watermelon — specifically watermelon, not “something he likes,” not “a preferred food” — became a documented tool. Every staff member caring for him now has access to it. Her private knowledge, the thing she’d figured out on her own through years of quiet attention, entered the system. It became part of how he is cared for by people who have never met his wife and may never know his full history.

That matters to me. A lot.

I think about how much of this kind of knowledge exists in the families sitting across from us in care planning meetings — and how rarely we actually go looking for it. We ask about allergies. We ask about dietary restrictions. We document the medical history. And then we move on, back to the protocol, back to the general approach, back to the thing that works reasonably well for most people.

But “reasonably well for most people” is not the same as knowing the person in front of you.

Protocols aren’t wrong. They’re necessary. They’re the floor. But they’re incomplete without the person underneath them. The watermelon strategy can’t be generalized — you can’t roll it out across a care home and expect it to work for everyone. It only works for him. It only exists because someone paid close enough attention to one specific person to discover it.

With that kind of attention, even what looks like an impossible situation often has a solution. Not a general solution. A specific one. One that was sitting with his wife all along, waiting to be asked for.

So the question I keep sitting with is this: in the toughest moments, when things seem impossible, do we take a step back and ask who this person actually is — what they’ve always loved, what’s always mattered to them? Or do we let the diagnosis speak louder than the person? Because having dementia doesn’t mean someone is lost to who they were. Maybe the answers we’re looking for were never going to come from a protocol. Maybe they were always going to come from remembering who it is we’re actually caring for.

Approximately 3 minutes reading time.