The hardest part is accepting that the person you are seeing and interacting with on any given day is not the person you knew. There are only shadowy bits and pieces of their former selves that you will see and desperately want to believe are still functioning like they were. But they aren't. It's just the remnants of it that still function, the rest is all new like a baby trying to learn the world...except in reverse.
A baby remembers and builds on it, an ALZ patient doesn't...and loses anything they learn as fast as they learn it...along with progressively more of what they had learned in the past. Most die when the brain destruction gets to the most protected part of the brain, the autonomic systems that control breathing, swallowing and heart beat. More than half die when they lose the ability to swallow and either slowly drown from fluid getting into their lungs or from an infection caused by that fluid.
if you ever need to care for someone with ALZ, educate yourself and read everything you can find. Don't trust any one opinion and build your own based on the composite evaluation of all you find. Also, never stop educating yourself...new stuff comes out every day.
In the end, all you can do is make sure they are safe and cared for. The rest is out of your hands. Forget about trying to "make them happy", it will only leave you emotionally wrecked. That's just an illusion that the person you knew is somehow still in there and you just have to find a way to get through to them. They aren't, and you cannot reach them.
Just make sure they are safe and cared for...until the end.
