At some point we noticed that mom had started hoarding papers, magazines, newspapers and mail. Her rooms was filled with stacks and stacks of papers everywhere -coffee tables, chairs, and boxes upon boxes with mixed up contents. I imagine that whenever she discovered something interesting she put it on a pile to save. She printed copy after copy of emails and genealogy research. She kept all her junk mail and grocery store flyers.
When we offered to help her sort through them, she told us it was necessary for her to keep everything. No amount of arguing or cajoling would change her mind. So, my sister and I teamed up to secretly stash papers in trash bags, and try and reorganize her house. Our strategy was: one of us would occupy her and the other would quietly purge.
What we failed to realize was the mom wasn’t clueless, she just had memory loss. So, when she discovered three huge garbage bags sitting outside her garage the next morning, she hauled them back into the house and pulled out her papers. I found one open bag a week later, sitting in a closet, with decaying food and wet papers spilling everywhere.
We learned our lesson after that, and always hauled away the bags after a secret purge. Years later, when mom was in the memory care, we discovered that she couldn’t see a black bag. It just appeared to her as a black hole. So, we would set up a black garbage bag right outside her room and using our strategy of distract and purge, we could keep mom’s room organized with minimum effort.
Reckoning With Alzheimer's 