One was helping her grandmother get to the bathroom in her condo. “The door to the bathroom was literally across from the door to her bedroom,” Sue says. But her grandmother kept getting lost while trying to find it. “We tried keeping the light on. The first night, it worked perfectly. The second night—she saw the light on, got up, went into the bathroom, turned off the light, [and] went back to bed.”
Sue says she and her family members also tried to put up baby gates to keep her grandmother from wandering to other parts of her condo at night. “These worked perfectly during the day. At night, they made her angry,” she says.
Sue says that caregiving for a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease is a “perfectly imperfect journey,” adding, “it’s reasonable we’ll struggle. We didn’t go to school for this.”
7. Use aids to help them keep track of time.
People with dementia can have difficulty keeping track of details like what time and day it is. “Grammy had a tendency to take a nap and then wake up and think it was a new day,” Cecelia N. tells SELF of her grandmother. So, her family installed two clocks on the wall. One told the date; the other told the time and showed a sun or moon to help distinguish night from day. “Those types of things really helped,” she says.
8. Build in more time for chores and self-care tasks than your loved one would have needed before.
Chores and self-care can be a challenge for people with Alzheimer’s. Cecelia cites taking a shower as an example. It might seem simple, but there are actually so many components, from turning the knob on the faucet, to shampooing and conditioning, to picking up the soap and putting it on a washcloth. This can make something as seemingly easy as taking a shower really difficult and time-consuming for someone with Alzheimer’s. (Or, if you’re helping them, it can take longer than you would expect.)
Try to help with some of these duties so life is easier for your loved one. Cecelia and her family helped her grandmother by doing her laundry, cooking her meals ahead of time, and putting them in the fridge, so they just had to be warmed up when she was hungry. “The days are long, but their care is so important,” Cecelia says.
9. Accommodate (or anticipate) their requests if you can, even if you don’t understand them.
Jeff used to maintain a website and blog about living with Alzheimer’s but wanted Kim to review his posts before he published them. That often meant she had a bunch of tasks to complete as soon as she got home from work. “It was a lot and was difficult to do, but I know it was very difficult for him,” she says.
On a related note, Amy’s father often liked to write things down to jog his memory. “It made him feel better,” she says. “I started keeping notepads and pens handy so he could write down what was important to him. Often what he wrote down made no sense, but I wanted to do whatever I could to help.”
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