When you have an older parent or grandparent that suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, it’s easy to dismiss them as no longer having a firm grasp on their memories. While it’s true that their cognitive functioning is declining, there’s no reason to believe that their memory is completely gone or faulty to a point where they can’t carry on meaningful conversations. Here, we’ve put together a few ideas that you can use to help your mom or dad more easily share their memories with you or other family members. Depending on where they are in their struggle against the disease, you will find that some of these might be more difficult than others and you might be carrying the larger burden of the conversations in some, but the effort that you put into this will be well worth it as you both grow closer together. Most of these are also something that you can do with them at any stage of the disease, whether they are receiving in-home care, in an assisted living facility, or even a nursing home.
Look through photo albums. Sometimes it takes more than one stimuli to help someone with Alzheimer’s remember something. Using both conversation and photographs will help stimulate brain cells more completely, helping those that are suffering from dementia to remember something that they might not have if just one of those techniques were used. One fun thing that you can do with an elderly loved one is to go through the people present in each photograph and each of you tell one memory that you have of that person. If you don’t know someone, just say that. It’s likely that both of you will come across at least a few of these people as you go through the photos.
Closely related to looking through a photo album is to create a new scrapbook. Collecting and saving things has been shown to help slow down the progress of the memory loss, and it can be a fun way to interact together. Start with their interests, and find a way to make it fun. You can clip pictures out of magazines or newspapers, use stickers, write little quotes or saying in the scrapbook, or any of a variety of other things. It really doesn’t matter as long as these things have meaning and the process of doing so is fun.
You can also bake a family recipe together. This is a great idea if your loved one used to cook this themselves. Not only does it help with the audio and visual cues that we talked about with the photo albums, but the kinetic activity of cooking or baking something that they’ve made before helps stimulate on an even more intensive level. This is something that can be done even if they are in a wheelchair, you will just need to be a bit more creative with it. For example, instead of having them prep all of the ingredients, they can take on a more supervisory role. This is also a great time to talk about memories that are associated with this particular dish. It might be tough to do this if your loved one resides in a nursing home.
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