r/dementia

We had some hot days lately and my grandfather (with dementia) is still cold. The temps reached in the 80s outside, but he refused to let us open doors and windows to cool the house because he was cold.

He has a small space heater by his feet to help, many blankets and access to warmer clothes. My Nan cannot handle the heat with her heart issues, so she sits outside.

The house is big and we knew the temps were going to dip back down in the coming days, so we don't turn the ac on until we absolutely have to. With summer coming up, the house will turn into a sauna and no one but him can stand it.

Does anyone else have this happen with your loved one? What have you done to help? We don't want him to be miserable, but we cannot stand it either. We were hoping to find some tips in advance before we all die of heat stroke.

My mother has always been, even on the best of days, a Difficult Person. She has vascular dementia sitting at DBAT stage 5, although no offical diagnosis because she's never in her life accepted there could ever be anything wrong with her body or her behavior.

I've seen all this coming from miles away, and she has a solid estate plan and I have both medical POA and financial POA.

A couple of weeks ago I think she took a tumble that she was too embarrassed to tell me about. I noticed pretty abruptly her cognition fell off a cliff -- suddenly she can't figure out the thermostat that's been in the house since 1975, and shortly after asked me why she was getting a bill for electricity from the power company when she knew her furnace was gas.

**The big question, the reason I'm here, is she's also now refusing to pay any credit card bills on the grounds "I already paid at the store!"**

She's always been sharp with money; she's well-off and she watches her investment account like a hawk, and goes to the local bank two or three times a day to get her checking account balance. We've been struggling with a while with her making a purchase, forgetting about it, and then disputing the charges.

I don't know how to proceed here, because if I use my POA powers to pay the bills she is likely to 1) dispute them anyway and 2) actively revoke the POA.

I don't want to take steps for full guardianship, and I think she would have a nuclear meltdown if I tried for a conservatorship. Please share any advice or experience you have with how to navigate using their money to pay their own bills when they actively don't want you to.

My grandmother has dementia and is increasingly volatile toward her husband, chasing him everywhere when she's distraught, and telling me gross details about their past sex life and crying about how awful and "impotent" he was. She goes into extreme detail and it makes me want to puke. It's her current obsessive topic. She's also been going on about divorcing him, calling the police on him, and how her neighbor is writing her letters about staying at their place so she's "safe".

How do I bleach my mind of these rants? She's been calling me in complete hysterics about it at random, and I never see it coming.

If there are what are their names. If there aren't how much would you consider paying for such a drug. Eta: spelling

Because of you, I have no life. I've given it all to you. That would make it so damned easy to just leave, because I have no ties. Except you. And I don't want you.

Sorry guys. I'm just having a rough day with a man I grew up loving, liking, and respecting. Somewhere between 2008 and 2012 he almost certainly had a stroke and he wasn't the brilliant, resourceful, and kind man that he was before.

I don't like this person. I didn't like the person he was before the Alzheimer's. This is all duty. Duty to take care of my father because that's what a good man does, and duty to myself, or rather, my self-image. I owe it to him and me to be as kind and generous as I know how to be towards someone I don't like or respect. I think I'm doing pretty well, all things considered. But I can't talk about this specific part with my sibling, his other caretaker, and the only other person who's here with me carrying this albatross (and we're not even the ones who shot the damned thing).

I joined this sub specifically to ask about a situation with a coworker. I’m hoping relatives and caregivers might be able to give me advice. How best to say goodbye, celebrate and support a retiring coworker who has recently diagnosed early onset dementia?

Would a digital picture frame filled with coworkers pictures be appropriate? Is there something that we could do that would help his wife or adult children? (We will do a monetary gift) Thank you for any advice.

My grandma was diagnosed 3 years ago when she was 89. My mom and I have been trying to get her to move for a year and a half but she has enough wherewithal to know she doesn’t want to go there. She wants to die in her house, and I don’t blame her. I want to die before I get to a stage like this.

She lives alone in a big house. Sets off the fire alarms burning toast at least once every two weeks. Confused, not sure what’s happening. Thinks we’re coming in her house and moving stuff around. She loses her house keys and her storm door locks from the inside with a key. It simply isn’t safe but she still won’t move.

Adult services is no help, they can’t force anyone to do anything against their will.

I read this and another Reddit r/agingparents saying short of them hurting themselves and landing in the hospital then moving there isn’t much we can do.

My mom picked her up today and just went to show her the new place on the guise of a tour. The people knew they were coming. She went ahead of my mom and the “tour guide” took her in first and my mom shut the door behind them.

We both feel horrible about how this had to go down. But it was either this trick, or wait until she got hurt or burned the house down!

She’s probably so pissed, and potentially her relationship with her best friend, my mom, may be ruined.

Fuck dementia.

Location: New York State

An 86-year-old widow has 4 adult children (3 sons, 1 daughter). She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and qualified for 24/7 in-home care.

Originally, she named her daughter as Power of Attorney. One of the sons became angry that his sister was “in control,” took their mother to a lawyer and allegedly convinced her that the daughter was stealing from her and that she needed to switch POA to him. At that point, the mother already had cognitive decline and confusion and agreed.

After becoming POA, the son had the mother sign over roughly $500,000 in checks to him over about 2 years, which he allegedly gambled away. He also opened a joint bank account with her and used her ATM card. He did not sign checks as POA — the mother physically signed them herself — but she reportedly had significant memory impairment and would sign anything put in front of her. She could not even complete a clock drawing test at that time.

There is evidence that the daughter, while previously acting as POA, never took money for herself. Before the Alzheimer’s progression, the son had never received gifts anywhere near this size.

My question is: in New York, could this rise to criminal elder financial abuse, exploitation, larceny, or breach of fiduciary duty by a POA, even if the son argues the money was all “gifts” from his mother? Does someone acting as POA have a fiduciary obligation to stop taking money from a cognitively impaired parent rather than facilitating large transfers to themselves?

**\*\*\*\*Part 2 / Additional context:** Once the daughter realized what had happened with the POA and also saw that her brother was not facilitating the 24/7 home care their mother qualified for, she petitioned the court for third-party guardianship. The son was reportedly leaving their mother alone overnight and for extended periods during the day despite her condition and care needs. The court granted third-party guardianship relatively quickly.

The appointed guardian’s position is that aggressively investigating the son right now could upset and agitate the elderly mother (the guardian’s ward), and that the daughter will have to wait until her mother passes away to fully pursue the issues.

Does the fact that third-party guardianship was granted relatively quickly suggest the court already had serious concerns about the son’s conduct/capacity to care for her?
Is it really true that this cannot be investigated until the mother dies, or can APS, law enforcement, the DA, or another authority investigate financial exploitation while she is still alive?

**Additional question:**

How are cases like this usually proven if the elderly person physically signed the checks herself?

The concern isn’t forgery, it’s whether someone with diagnosed Alzheimer’s truly understood what she was signing or the amounts involved. The massive “gifts” only started after cognitive decline and were far outside anything she had ever given before.

Also, if someone is acting as POA, don’t they have a fiduciary duty to protect the person’s finances rather than continue accepting unusually large checks from someone they know is cognitively impaired? Or can they simply argue, “She wanted me to have it, I’m her son!.” The line becomes blurred. Morally, everyone knows this is wrong. But how can it be proven that the incapacitated person was not lucid each time she signed a check (or at least a majority of the time)?

My grandmother (78) started developing dementia in 2018 after a head injury. We suspect it’s vascular dementia. She started living with me in 2022, already her speech had degraded to babbling and constant supervision was necessary. In 2024 she started having seizures. At first they were every three months but the event horizon has shortened and more recently they are between two to four weeks apart and sometimes two in a day. I guess my question is, does anyone else have this experience?

I am really struggling with my guilt and feelings toward placing my wife into memory care. The moving day is imminent and i don't know whether or not to tell her about it. I am not sure what she retains or doesn't, so don't know whether she can comprehend anything other than her emotional reaction to change. A large part of wanting to tell her is wanting to feel less guilty about what keeps coming to mind as abandoning her, even though I know that a place where there are people available to help her 24/7, provide better hygiene care, more social interaction, and better nutrition is better for her than any care I can continue to provide at home, but it isn't home and I won't be there beside her 24/7.

So my mom doesn't have a diagnosis of dementia, but we've been noticing signs for a while that something isn't right. Today, I noticed she had 19 of the same vitamin, which seemed like a lot. So I did some digging in her Shopify account and was astonished at what I found. In the past three months, she has signed up for over $1,700 in monthly subscriptions. She says she didn't sign up for many of them, but that doesn't seem accurate, since they are the kinds of things I've seen her purchase. I've canceled as many of them as I can, but some of the companies have her locked into a certain number of shipments before they will let her cancel. It's crazy.

I'm stumped as to how to keep this from happening again. It's not even the first time she's bought an outrageous number of things before (Looking at you, 50 cases of toilet paper). It's a family credit card, so we need to be able to use it for purchases, so I can't cancel it. How are you all keeping these random, midnight purchases from destroying your finances?

My dad was diagnosed 2 years ago and I started having panic attacks, which I got medication & therapy for. My parents spend half the year down south and last year my mom didn't want to go--she's caring for him alone and has no support system there--but she went back anyway because he wanted to. I thought we were totally over the notion of him driving and learned yesterday that she allowed him to drive "just a few blocks." I told her he still could have hurt someone. They are back now (up north where I live.) He's 86; she's 85. I found a great companion care option for them but my mom is hemming and hawing. When I think about spending another summer and beyond worrying about them, watching my mom white knuckle through doing everything for him alone and refuse help it makes me want to run for the hills. I can't keep watching this and they won't accept help and dont seem to know or care that if they won't do it for themselves could they do it for my brother and I who are beside ourselves with worry and anxiety about this untenable situation. (I did say something to my mom about it today, to no effect.)

I don't know what to do; it's ruining my mental health

Some of my thoughts ... I lost her so long ago and so gradually that I can't point to the moment I lost her, but she has been gone a very long time even before her passing. She died on April 12 at 9am (1012 hrs officially). That was the moment that her body died. At that point her passing was a relief as her suffering was over, and the dystopian nightmare she was trapped in was ended. That was the hardest part, as that void got deeper and darker I was powerless to stop it and end it, I was powerless to wake her up and make everything alright. I've never felt a more profound mix of feelings between wailing that she was gone, and rejoicing that she was free and at peace.

I'd give anything to be able to make one more smart ass comment, and have her playfully smack me one more time. Even during her decline stuff like that was there, that sly smile when I told her that she was so cute when she tried to act tough. That's the part of me that desperately wanted to drag it out, to enjoy the crumbs of who she was, but I'll never see that sly smile again, because she is in fact and finitely gone ... but at the same time I'm glad she is gone because all of the nightmare that went along with the few crumbs is over and she is at peace.

It's a weird place. I hope that this will ring true, or possibly prepare others whose love ones are in the midst of this disease. I am using a counselor to navigate the grief. Two truths can coexist ... grieving the loss of your LO, and rejoicing that their struggle is over.

Grief isn't what I expected ... I thought it would be all weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth ... although there were a couple of instances of that ... it's more like a mine field. You take a step, and you're OK ... you take a couple more steps and you're still more OK than you expected ... then you step on a memory mine and curblewy.

p.s. Nothing was done to drag it out. Actually another tough thing was standing as her advocate, enforcing her advance directives for nothing to extend the process. Despite some family debate, and nusing facility trying to force feed, her wishes were carried out to the letter.

Hello everyone,
I am seeking advice on what to do about my once gentle, loving, brilliant elderly (97) dad.

His personality has completely changed - but he exhibits little or NO memory loss - most likely he has frontotemporal dementia (FTD). He can remember dates, times, even reminds me that he needs his 3P pill.

However, for the past 3 years he exhibits almost daily raging and abusive rants - all centered a former aid who left our employ 1 1/2 years ago because of his behavior, which included berating her for working for other clients, claiming she was treating other clients better than him, things like things like that.

This former aid has become ALL he thinks and talks about, and he believes I "secretly" fired her due to my jealousy of their close relationship. This "relationship," he insists, is nothing romantic, that she is like a daughter to him, but he looks at her picture all day on his phone, and demands to see her every, single day from morning to night, no exaggeration, getting more and more angry when we say we can't do that (or we try to re-direct or ignore).

He has a neurologist and a psychiatrist. We have tried talk therapy and it really backfired. We tried all the different types of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds - they made the behavior worse. Now we're onto anti-psychotics (Abilify). It worked beautifully for one week(!), and then his raging came back worse than ever before. We've upped the dose (it's still very low, don't worry) but ... I've lost hope.

I realized how his behavior was affecting me when I actually got more than 4 hours of sleep last week for the first time in months, during the Abilify honeymoon. I simply do not know how to communicate with him in a way that doesn't trigger a rant that goes on for literally HOURS. I've tried re-directing, ignoring, being totally neutral, screaming, crying - all of it. If anyone has had a similar experience and can offer any advice or resources (like some brilliant geriatric psychiatrist to consult?), I would very much appreciate it. Thank you, sorry for such a long message.

PS "Abilify Honeymoon" title of my autobiography

My mother calls me every day or two to ask me if I got my red sticker. She thinks there's a red sticker that will give me a discount on gas. I tell her every time that they don't have that here. (I'm in another state.)

I don't know if this is something she saw on TV, dreamt, or dreamt up in her confused mind.

Has anyone heard of this?

My watch is almost over. My mom is in home hospice, and I'm staying by her side 24/7. My mom is always asleep due to pain medications and because her body is starting to shut down. If she wakes up, it's only for about 1 minute. She has friends from church who are visiting a lot. I'm fine with that. But when they stay 1-2 hours, I start to worry that all their noise and chatter might be too much. I wonder if 30 min. time limits are best? I just don't know.

By the end of the day, my dad was exhausted from all the unfamiliar faces and introductions. Since he’s still mostly unaware of what this transition truly means, it wasn’t an emotional or dramatic goodbye. On my way out, one of the staff members gave me a hug, and I realized then how much I needed it.

We showed him his room and where all his things were, even knowing he probably won’t remember any of it tomorrow. We toured the activity room, had lunch together, and spent as much time with him as we could. He was quiet most of the day.

When I kissed him goodbye, he asked if I’d be picking him up later. I told him, “Tomorrow.”

I wasn’t fully prepared for how heavy this would feel.

I’m trying to take care of myself too. I’m meeting my best friend later today, and I have plans this weekend so I’m not sitting alone with all of these emotions.

I know this is the beginning of a very different journey, one I’m largely navigating without my siblings. That’s why I’m especially grateful for this community. Everything I’ve learned here, along with all the kindness and support, has helped me more than I can express over these past months.

thanking every one for there help and support :

I’m not even sure of where to start because it’s A LOT but I guess I’ll just give some background and context of what’s going on with my family. I’m 17 weeks pregnant and currently my husband and I are moving out of my parent’s house within the next 2 weeks. About a year and a half ago we moved in with my parents to help out for a while since my dad (83m) was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer and my mom can no longer drive.

To say it briefly it has been tough, trying to work full time (same with husband) and supporting my parents through this. My dad has not made it any easier and neither has my mom, they are very difficult to live with and my mom has been very “poor me, woah is me” crying to family members and friends about what my dad is going through and also now saying how she is getting sick (she’s not sick, doctors keep telling her she’s fine and just has GERD). So, I’ve been the main one taking on the decision making and picking up the slack with my dad’s things. However, I am now 17 weeks pregnant with my husband’s and I’s first child. The whole family is very excited and so are my parents. But this has taken a toll on me.

Then this past month we’ve noticed a decline in my dad’s health, his behaviors/mood (very irritable and lashing out), cognitive reasoning, ability to talk (doesn’t make sense and we have a hard time trying to understand what he’s saying), and forgetting a lot of short term memory things. I’ve been on them with taking him to his doctor to see what’s going on, and if it’s something to do with his cancer treatment, medication, etc. Since my husband and I are moving out in 2 weeks because living here has become too much and I need to focus on my health, stress, and the baby.

Well, they went yesterday and his PCP at Kaiser diagnosed him with early onset dementia. They called my older sister who lives all the way down in LA with her husband and kid (we live in the Bay Area) and let her know what happened. Then my sister called me and my husband and I spoke with my parents when I got home. I’m not sure what steps to take and my mom is worried, scared, crying off and on (understandably so) but I need her to step up and become the adult. She is still very aware, cognitively present, but has this very Filipino mindset of “my daughter needs to be the one to help me with this burden” but right now I just physically and mentally can’t and need to focus on my pregnancy and when the baby comes.

I guess what I’m asking is for some advice on what needs to happen next? How should I get my mom on bored and step up? How much do I need to be involved in while navigating motherhood for the first time, or do I even get super involved?

EDIT/CORRECTION: Since people keep focusing on the “early onset” part, apparently they misunderstood but I’m just quoting what my parents and sister told me on what the doctor said. But that’s not my main focus, I’m asking for next steps, advice, or other people’s stories/experiences.