telling somehow about family visits in advance or not

[hilary23]

My brother now lives in housing with care, if I call him to say I am coming to visit with my daughter, he will worry and gets suspicious that I am coming to arrange something that might not be in his interest. he really enjoys the visits and talking to me on the telephone, but it seems that whenever he is not with us, he gets worried about what we are up to. He ended up calling another of my daughters at 6 in the morning after my call, she was able to reassure him, but he had obviously had a very unhappy time up until then. So we decided that it might be better to only let him know of our visit in the morning of the visit via the carers, so that he could just enjoy the visits without the worries, though we have not tried that yet.

Even more worrying and unhappy for him is the relationship with his son, who he loves to spend time with right now, but is so critical of as soon as he is not with him. So we try not to tell him about his son's visits, his son just turns up and he is always happy to see him. However, after his son is gone, he will tell us that he is not happy that things are just sprung on him like that. So this latest time we told him about his son coming to take him back from a trip to another of my daughters (for a special music festival, which he adores), and he has been saying such horrible things about his son and getting so upset and frightened, it feels like it would have been better not to have told him in advance even though he says he does not like it when we do so.

We feel bad either way, but are keen to do things that are in 'his best interest' as much as we can.

What do you all think? Any advice or experiences like this?

 

[FifiMo]

I would take the path that causes the least distress. I wouldn't tell him in advance and distress him. If he complains after the event I wouldn't go into long explanations or arguments. I would take responsibility for him being annoyed BUT merely say something like 'I am sorry, I forgot but will try and remember next time'. Then try and distract him and change the subject. With my mother we all started with asking how would it benefit her to be told something or not. The plan was to keep her as contented and stress frr as possible so all decisions were based on trying to achieve this. If she was apt to forget or get agitated by being told something, we just didn't tell her. If she complained we said sorry and we'd do better next time then move on.

You might find the following thread useful as it gives some tips about things we can do to help with communication. If you share it with the rest of the family then you can get consistency of approach too perhaps.

http://forum.alzheimers.org.uk/show...ionate-Communication-with-the-Memory-Impaired

Fiona