One More Thing Alzheimer’s Takes: The Family Group Text

When Family News No Longer Helps

When there’s family news—good or bad—I send a group text to my siblings and their spouses.

Recently, I sent one about our sister-in-law being seriously ill. A few days later, one of my siblings with Alzheimer’s called. His aphasia makes phone conversations difficult, and I couldn’t understand what he was asking. I assumed he was responding to a Facebook post about another relative, and I reassured him she was fine.

Later, my niece told me he had called her too, asking about her mother—the relative I had mentioned in the text. He wasn’t confused about Facebook. He was trying to process the message I had sent.

And then it became clear: my three siblings with dementia are all at a stage where sharing news is no longer helpful. If they can read it, it doesn’t inform them. It confuses them. They try to make sense of it. They worry. They forget. And if they read it again, the distress returns.

Two of them can’t navigate their phones to read the text. I sent it anyway. Leaving them out feels disrespectful.

They’re not gone. They’re not dead. They are still my brothers and sister. Including them feels like honoring that.

But if I’m honest, the text is for me. It lets me pretend, for a moment, that we still share family information the way we used to—that they can still process it, that we still carry news together.

They can’t. We don’t.

Sharing hard news doesn’t inform or connect us. It burdens them. I’ve already accepted that I can’t call for advice or talk the way we once did. Accepting that I can’t send an informational text is a new loss.

I feel selfish for not recognizing it sooner but, it’s hard to let go.

Not sending the message feels like erasing them.

Every day, Alzheimer’s steals something from the person who has it and from the people who love them. Today, it took the small comfort of sending a group text.

From now on, the hard news will stay with me. The group texts will be pictures of grandkids, pets, and the weather.