My Mom's memories are not just all jumbled up, she remembers things that never happened. Do you tell them the truth and try to get them as close to reality as possible? Or do you just let them ramble? It's the crying about things that never happened that get to me the most! What do you do?
Something that drove me batty and does still is the time compression. Things that happened years ago were only last month. Something that happened last year were last week. The order that things happened in is jumbled now. It is impossible for me to correct the time distortion even when it is important. She may say she fell last week and I tell her it was a year ago. I'm wrong, because she knows it was last week. She has totally lost her sense of time. It is a mind twisting thing for a caregiver, particularly when the event "last week" is what led to a current problem -- one that could be imaginary.
The ones that make your mother cry are another matter. You don't need to get her "close to reality" -- just close enough to relieve her distress. "Oh my, that would be a really sad thing to happen, wouldn't it? I'd feel very bad about that, too. But you know what? I think your memory is playing tricks on you. That sounds like something that happened in a television show. It isn't something that happened to you. Aren't you glad?"