Mum Mislaying items and thinking they're stolen.

[Amy in the US]

SnowWhite, the time to secure papers and photos is NOW. My mother destroyed important paperwork, family history papers, and a lot of irreplaceable photos. I have no picture at all of my grandmother or her family. And all my grandfather's writing (he wrote poems and short stories) are also gone. Don't wait and regret it, like me.

Get somebody to take her out so you can have a proper search without interruption or distressing her.

Best wishes.

 

[kareninskiathos]

KWhitty

This is really helpful to read, thank you for sharing your concerns, this is my mum to a tee. For years she'd mislay things and blame someone for taking them, usually the poor window cleaner. Earlier this year she was in hospital and the nurses suggested we get her tested for dementia and this May she was diagnosed with mixed Alzheimer's. It's hard to shrug it off when she loses important things like her house keys and she can't get out - many a time my uncle has had to get in through the window. I do worry about her safety if she needed to get out in a hurry or we needed to get in. I live over an hour's drive away and although I have keys she won't let my aunt and uncle have a set. I will try to be more relaxed about it though as I can see from the posts it's the best way to be.

 

[SnowWhite]

SnowWhite, the time to secure papers and photos is NOW. My mother destroyed important paperwork, family history papers, and a lot of irreplaceable photos. I have no picture at all of my grandmother or her family. And all my grandfather's writing (he wrote poems and short stories) are also gone. Don't wait and regret it, like me.

Get somebody to take her out so you can have a proper search without interruption or distressing her.

Best wishes.

THanks. Can't do that I'm afraid. Our family is so dysfunctional that it wouldn't work. I'm the only person who ever takes her out and that's usually to spend a weekend with us. I have already been falsely accused of taking money off my Mum and I'm sick to death of it.

 

[irismary]

When I visit mom now I spend half the time looking for stuff. TV remote, glasses, handbag. Keys were missing for several days then just turned up. SIL has taken them away as she has a keysafe. She thinks she's losing her eye sight but forgets to wear her glasses. When she puts them on she is thrilled she can see. Today she thinks she had a baby with another man fairly recently and she can't find the baby and the man hasn't been round for a while. Doesn't seem to upset her though.

 

[eddiesgirl]

An entire big bunch of bananas went missing in Mum's flat once. I looked everywhere (as I thought.) Two days later it turned up inside one of the cupboards I'd searched.

 

[Chemmy]

I have to agree about rescuing photos.

My MIL is currently responding very positively to photos taken pre-1950, but unfortunately she decided to have a clear out a few years ago, and many irreplaceable old ones were chucked out without her asking any of us if we would like them.

I took the remaining ones and scanned them, and have since been able to produce a photo book for her - which is just as well as SIL took the originals for 'safe-keeping' when the house was cleared and we haven't seen anything of them again since either. I also found a couple of photos of grandparents by looking in the Internet where family members in Australia, whom we've lost touch with, had posted a few on line.

Old family photos belong to the wider family, not the individual, in my view, and in this digital age, are so easy to share.

 

[jen54]

Mum moves stuff around more and more, I think she gets restless in evenings and sorts stuff and of course doesn't recall, the only answer she can come to is someone else has taken stuff, she also think people are getting in and putting rubbish on her drainer...i suppose the brain has to make sense of things being missing from familiar places, though mum is generally forgetting where her stuff should be,so we get less of accusations of things stolen these days