Visiting Someone Who Does Not Know You Anymore

You drive over, sit down, and she asks whether you have come about the room. Later she tells you her mother is collecting her at four. Your mother has been dead for thirty years.

You leave feeling hollow, and slightly ashamed of how much you wanted her to say your name.

What you are grieving is real

Nobody prepares you for mourning someone who is sitting in front of you drinking tea.

The person is here and the relationship has changed beyond recognition. You have lost the shared history, the advice, the being known by them, and you are not allowed any of the ordinary rituals, because to everyone else nothing has happened.

That is a genuine grief, and it tends to arrive in waves rather than once: at the first time she calls you by her sister's name, the first time you leave and she does not notice, the first Christmas she does not know it is Christmas.

Feeling relief alongside the sadness is also normal, and so is feeling nothing on a given day. None of it makes you a bad son or daughter or friend.

Stop correcting, and follow instead

The instinct is to put reality back: Mom, your mother died in 1994, it is me, your daughter.

That almost never helps. It cannot be remembered, so it has to be absorbed as fresh bad news each time, and it leaves the person frightened and you both upset.

The alternative is to go where they are. If she is waiting for her mother, you can ask about her mother: what she was like, what she cooked, what she would say. If she thinks you are a nurse, you can be the nice person who has come to sit with her for a while.

That is not lying to someone. It is choosing their comfort over being technically correct, and it makes the difference between an hour that works and an hour that ends in tears.

Where you can, answer the feeling rather than the question. Someone asking to go home is usually saying they feel unsafe, and what settles that is not an explanation but a warm voice, a cup of tea and company.

Make the visit easier before you arrive

Go at the time of day when they are at their best, which for many people is the morning. Late afternoon is often harder.

Keep it short and regular rather than long and occasional. Twenty good minutes beats two draining hours, and nobody is keeping score; if they will not remember the length, you may as well choose the version that leaves you both in better shape.

Bring one thing and nothing else: a familiar song, a photograph, something to eat, hand cream, a plant to repot. Having something to do with your hands removes the pressure to make conversation, which is the part that goes wrong most often.

Two people is usually easier than one. Six is overwhelming.

What to do instead of talking

Conversation relies on recent memory, which is exactly what is missing. So lean on the things that do not.

Music from when they were young, which lasts far longer than almost anything else. Old photographs rather than new ones. Singing, which often survives when speech has gone. Touch, if they like it: holding a hand, hand cream, brushing hair. A short walk. Watching birds out of the window.

And let silence be fine. Sitting together quietly is a real visit; the need to fill it is yours, not theirs.

Keep your tone slow and warm and your sentences short. Tone and face carry the meaning long after the words stop landing.

On the hard days

Some visits go badly whatever you do. They can be agitated, cold, accusing, convinced you have stolen something.

That is the illness talking, and knowing it does not stop it hurting. Do not argue the accusation; agree that it is upsetting, change the subject, make a drink, step out for five minutes and come back in.

If the visit is going nowhere, it is allowed to end early. Leaving is not a failure, and most people with memory problems take their cue from your mood rather than the clock.

Then look after yourself on the way home: do not go straight into something demanding, and tell someone how it went. People in this position do an enormous amount of it silently.

Keep yourself in the picture

This can go on for years, which means it has to be arranged like something sustainable rather than a crisis.

Share the visits where there is anyone to share them with. Accept that your sibling who comes twice a year will have opinions and will not understand the hour you have just had.

Find one other person who is doing the same thing. Carer groups for families living with memory loss are unusually good, because what you most need is other people who already know and do not need it explained.

When to get help

Please talk to a doctor if you are not sleeping, dreading every visit, drinking more, or feeling nothing at all; those are signs of being past capacity rather than of not caring enough.

Ask too for the practical help that exists and is widely unclaimed: a carer's assessment for you, day services, respite, memory clinic support, and advice on money and legal arrangements while they can still take part in those decisions. A therapist or a counselor is the right place for the grief itself, which is harder than almost anyone outside this situation understands, and which deserves more than being carried quietly on the drive home.