[seanhunter]

They would forget where they put them.

Joking aside, (and I speak as someone who has lost 2 close members of my family to dementia), as soon as people start to experience any form of dementia, there is a sort of coping mechanism that kicks in where they stop doing “complex” things as much as they used to, because there is a huge amount of anxiety that is caused by losing short-term memory (you are constantly thrown into situations where you can’t make sense of what’s going on). So my mother-in-law for example, stopped cooking for herself long before some of the other symptoms really became apparent. She told everyone she was “bored of it”, and when cooking for a larger group she wolud constantly check and recheck the recipe. At the time it drove me crazy but then later when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s it all started to make sense.