Caring for a Parent Who Is Forgetting

Families notice the memory first. A name that will not come. The same question three times in an hour. Money put somewhere safe and then gone. What nobody tells them is what comes after that.

Caring for the elderly is part of what Lift A Life Foundation is registered to do. None of what follows is medical advice: memory loss has more than one cause and only a clinician can say which, so the first step is a health facility. The rest is about how a household holds together, and who is holding it.

The person is not being difficult on purpose

The most damaging idea in these homes is that the behaviour is deliberate. Refusing to wash, hiding things, insisting on going out. Families read it as stubbornness and answer it the way you answer defiance. It does not work.

Repetition is not disobedience. If the answer did not stay, the question is new every time it is asked. Saying "I have already told you" corrects nothing and only tells them they have failed again.

An accusation of theft usually means something is lost. When the memory of putting an item away has gone with it, the mind supplies an explanation and the nearest person becomes the thief. Look for the item, let the accusation go. Once the family stops taking it personally, most of the daily fighting stops too.

Routine and familiar surroundings do more than anything you can buy

Keep the day in the same order. Waking, washing, eating, sitting outside, sleeping, at the same times and places. A memory that cannot hold new information can still run on habit, and habit needs a predictable day.

Do not rearrange the house. Moving a bed, a chair or the shelf where the cups live takes away something the person was still managing alone. A room learned over years is memory kept outside the head. Think just as hard before moving the person to a relative in another town.

Label rather than correct. Large plain writing on the toilet door, the bedroom, the kitchen. One instruction at a time. And telling someone a husband died years ago, when they have just asked where he is, delivers the loss again as though it were new. Answer the feeling, then move to something in front of them.

Fire, water and the gate

The cooking fire comes first. A jiko or a lamp left burning, a pot forgotten, a cloth near a flame. Somebody else takes over the cooking, and matches live where they are not picked up by chance. Do this before an accident, not after one.

Wandering is not running away. A person may set out for a house they left decades ago, entirely certain about it. Tell the neighbours and the shopkeepers, write a phone number inside the clothing, and make the gate latch take a moment to work out.

Look at the floor and the lighting: a fall changes everything that follows it. One person should take charge of the medicines so nothing is taken twice or missed, and tell the clinician what is being taken. Paraffin and cleaning liquids stay out of reach, never in a drink bottle.

Keep them in the life of the home

The back room is the usual ending. The person is settled somewhere quiet and out of the way, and the family gets on around them. It is understandable, and it removes the conversation and movement that were doing more good than anyone realised.

Give them work that still fits. Sorting beans, folding clothes, peeling, holding a baby, sitting with the animals. It need not be done well or quickly. Being useful is not a small thing to lose.

Old memory often outlasts new, so songs and stories from long ago are frequently intact on a day when this morning is not. Tell the children in the house plainly what is happening. They cope well with the truth and badly with a tense secret, and they will keep visiting if nobody teaches them to be afraid.

The carer nobody asks about

In nearly every one of these households, one person is doing all of it, and she is usually a daughter or a wife. Nobody appointed her. She sleeps lightly, eats last, has not left the compound in months, and says they are managing.

She needs relief, not admiration. Someone else in the chair for a few hours, so she can leave the house. Fix it as an arrangement, a named person on a named day, because "call me if you need anything" is an offer nobody calls in.

Her own health slides quietly. Her clinic appointments are the first thing dropped, and her tiredness is treated as ordinary until it is not. If she stops being able to do this, the whole arrangement collapses. Relatives at a distance can send money, take a week, or carry a monthly share.

Networking and community building are part of our registered work, which in practice means connecting households like these to what exists locally. If you are caring for a parent who is forgetting in Ruiru, or you know a home where one person is carrying it alone, tell us. If you can give a few regular hours so a carer can leave the gate, we would like to hear from you.