Sundowning

Dad keeps getting very cranky and hard to deal with late in the afternoon. He seems to go through an angry, you're-all-upset-with-me-for-no-reason, tantrumy phase every day at about the same time. I finally looked it up (yay Google!) and discovered this is a normal part of dementia called sundowning. Dad doesn't have severe dementia, but anyone his age is bound to have some degree of it. It's nice to know that it's not anything we're doing wrong; it's just something that's going to happen, and we'll have to learn to cope with it. It also seems that lighting his room better might help. He insists on turning off the overhead light; if I can convince him to keep it on, that may improve matters.