It is very important to maintain relationships when someone moves into residential care, so when choosing a home you'll need to think how often you'll be able to visit and the other options for contact.
When visiting, remember that this is now her home, it should be possible to spent a morning or even a whole day with your loved one. Take her out if possible; have lunch together; join her for the afternoon's activities and meet her new friends.
Support all the PIECES of the Person
P- Physical - Make the person as comfortable as possible. Meet basic needs and special conditions affecting care (e.g. vision, hearing, and acute illness)
-Try to minimize pain
I- Intellectual - Remember what and how I am communicating makes a difference.
-Validate feelings instead of arguing. Remember the person sees the world differently
E-Emotional - Be sensitive to this person's unique needs
-Provide comfort and reassurance when needed
C-Capabilities - Watch for and ask about the person's strengths and use these to create support strategies
-Give cues to get the person started - let them help
E- Environment - Look for things in the environment that might explain changes in behavior
-Think of ways to change lighting and make the environment familiar
S-Social - Talk to the person and be mindful of their life history and interests
- U-First Handbook, Alzheimer's Society
Maybe if we can learn how to inhabit tension, space between opposites, then dementia and the lives it touches can rejoin the spectrum of human experience,
rather than being reduced to tired tropes and burdened by outsized fears,
its sufferers and caregivers made to disappear.
I imagine if we received all lives- those with and without dementia - as conglomerations of the ordinary and the peculiar, the fragmented and the whole, the present and the vanishing.
- Lynn Casteel Harper, On Vanishing book