What you're allowed to stop doing

Every other page here hands you something to do. This one takes things off the list. Most of what exhausts a caregiver isn't the disease; it's a standard nobody actually requires, held onto out of love and guilt. You can put some of it down without putting them down.

The daily bath

This is the fight families have most, and it's usually a fight over a rule that doesn't exist. Guidance from both the Alzheimer's Association and the National Institute on Aging is a bath or shower two or three times a week, with flexibility, because daily bathing often isn't necessary. On the other days, a wash at the sink for face, hands, feet, underarms and the private areas does the real work.

What you can't skip: keeping skin clean and dry where it matters, especially after any incontinence. That's not vanity; it's how you prevent sore, broken skin and infections. So the rule is not "less washing." It's less production. (The how, when it's still a battle: Chapter 3 and the refusing-to-bathe card.)

Correcting them

You are allowed to let a wrong year, a wrong name, and a long-dead relative stay wrong. This isn't lying to them or giving up on them; correcting a damaged memory asks it to do the one thing it can no longer do, and the usual harvest is fear and a fight. Most caregivers spend months learning this. You can just start today.

What you can't skip: the moments where facts are safety, which are few and obvious. Whether the stove is on. Whether they've taken the pill. Whether they can drive. (The full case, including the Scripture-based question of whether any of this is dishonest: Chapter 2 and "Am I lying to them?".)

The house at its old standard

Ironing. A made bed by 9am. Dusting rooms nobody enters. Cooking from scratch when the freezer aisle exists. Matching outfits when they're comfortable in what they've got on. Nobody is coming to inspect, and if a visitor judges the state of your kitchen, that tells you exactly how much help they were ever going to be.

What you can't skip: the floor. Clear paths, no throw rugs, lights on the way to the bathroom. Housekeeping is optional; fall prevention isn't. (Ten minutes, once: the safety walk-through.)

The holiday at full size

The twenty-person dinner, the long church service, the four-hour drive, the tree that takes a day to put up. Big, loud, changed rooms are hard on someone with dementia and brutal on the person managing everyone else's feelings about it. A smaller version isn't a failure of the tradition; it's the tradition surviving in a form that fits. Twenty good minutes with two people beats three exhausting hours with twelve.

What you can't skip: telling people in advance what's changed, or they'll fill the silence with their own theories. The one-page note that does it for you is the How to visit sheet in your notebook.

Keeping everyone updated

You do not owe seven separate phone calls repeating the worst news of your life. One group text, one weekly update, one designated relative who tells the others: any of these is a complete answer. "I'll send an update Sunday" is a full sentence, and people who love you will adjust.

What you can't skip: one person who actually knows everything, in case something happens to you. That's a different job from keeping the family informed, and it lives in the fridge sheet.

Activities you both secretly hate

If the puzzle ends in tears every time, the puzzle is not therapy. If the memory book makes them anxious, close it. The point was never the activity; it was the ten minutes of feeling capable and together. Any activity that reliably produces failure has stopped doing its job, and dropping it is good practice, not laziness. (What tends to work instead, by who they've always been: activities.)

Being endlessly patient

Nobody is. The standard isn't sainthood, it's repair: when you snap, and you will, you step out of the room for two minutes and come back gentle. They will very often have no memory of the sharp voice, and you get to hand yourself the same fresh start their illness hands them. Walking away for two minutes is a legitimate technique, not a failure of love.

What you can't skip: your own floor. If the snapping is becoming most days, if you're frightened of yourself, or the darkness won't lift, that's a signal, not a character verdict. Chapter 5, and 988 by call or text, any hour.

Why the guilt is lying to you

Guilt feels like evidence. It almost never is. The feeling that you should be doing more is produced by loving someone with a disease that gets worse no matter what you do; it is not a report on your performance. The clearest test anyone has offered: would you say this to a friend in your position? If not, it isn't truth, it's exhaustion talking in a familiar voice.

Dropping the optional things is not the beginning of neglect. It is what makes it possible to still be standing, and still be kind, in the year that actually matters. A caregiver who collapses helps no one; the person who paces themselves is the one who is still there at the end.

Bathing guidance verified July 2026 with the Alzheimer's Association and the National Institute on Aging. Everything else here is the settled craft of dementia care, not medical advice; your person's own clinicians know things this page can't.