My grandmother suffered from dementia for about ten years before she passed away. She was a dear soul, and well loved by the entire family. It was very difficult to see her mental abilities fading. Most of us only had a vague idea of what dementia is.  We thought it was all Alzheimers, but our aunt told us that it wasn’t Alzheimers.  Understanding dementia was not our strong point!  We would go visit her as often as we could, but it was sad that every time we went to see her we had to tell her who we were. Ten minutes later we had to tell her who we were again. And again. Yet she had really great memories of her childhood!  From what we’ve been told, those are classic dementia symptoms.

So we learned that they best way to have a good visit with grandma was to simply keep asking her to tell us about her childhood. That kept her happily talking, and kept us from being frustrated by trying to remind her constantly of who we were.  I don’t think that our aunt really took grandma to participate in any kind of dementia treatment.  I don’t know if it was a money issue or not, but I assume that was the case because they were very poor.