Shark Tank's Barbara Corcoran Recalls Caregiving for Her Mom with Alzheimer’s: 'Grieving in Slow Motion' (Exclusive)

• Shark Tank star and real-estate icon Barbara Corcoran opens up about how she and her 9 siblings banded together when their family's matriarch, Florence, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease
• She shared that her brother took a class on Alzheimer's patient care, and advised them to start "acknowledging her realities" instead of correcting them
• While she says they were prepared for memory loss, the family was not expecting their mom's personality changes

For 15 seasons, Shark Tank star Barbara Corcoran has invested in 120 businesses while also managing her successful real estate agency, The Corcoran Group.

But when the cameras were off, Corcoran, along with her 9 siblings, banded together to care for their mother Florence as she struggled with Alzheimer’s, until she died 12 years ago.

“I adored my mom. She walked on the water,” Corcoran, 75, tells PEOPLE. “She's been my role model my whole life.”

So it was difficult when her mom started experiencing signs of dementia.

“It's hard to tell when it really begins, you know,” Corcoran, says about the onset of Alzheimer’s, as early symptoms — such as memory loss — are easily dismissed as general signs of aging.

Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia, considered to cause up to 70% of the 55 million people globally who suffer from dementia, according to the Mayo Clinic, which estimates that 6.5 million people in the United States who are 65 and older have Alzheimer’s.

Although a definitive cause has yet to be determined, the National Institute on Aging says it's a "combination of age-related changes in the brain, along with genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors."

For Corcoran, Alzheimer’s ran in her family — with all four of her uncles, her mom's brothers, being diagnosed with the disease. 

“I don't know why we were surprised, really, that it happened to her. She seemed more capable than her brothers,” she tells PEOPLE about her mom, who famously raised ten children in a two-bedroom apartment in Edgewater, New Jersey. "We thought she would get lucky."

Now, she's speaking out to help others on their caregiving journeys. “I really feel like I can help people have more of an awareness of what's going on, she explains, adding that she wants to share strategies she and her siblings used.

The personality changes that can accompany Alzheimer’s were the “biggest shock," she says. “It’s grieving in slow motion.”

Here, she tells PEOPLE more about her experience as her mom's mental health declined.

When did you first realize that something was going on with your mother’s health?
“She was in Brooklyn at my brother's house,” Corcoran says. “She walked into the room and she didn't recognize him. She said, ‘Who are you?’ And that spooked us. We said, ‘This is more than just, she's losing her memory. She didn't remember where she was.’ So that triggered us to bring her to a doctor and see what was going on.”  

What did you learn about being a caregiver for someone with Alzheimer’s disease?
“My brother, Tom, took a course on how to care for an Alzheimer's patient, which was the most intelligent thing to do,” she said. His advice to the family was profound: "We had no right to expect my mother to come into our space the way we saw reality. So we stopped correcting hers.”

For example, “If she said, ‘Where's dad?’ We used to say, ‘Oh mom, don't you remember? Dad died.’ But she would go through the mourning all over again. It was terrible.” Instead, Corcoran says, “We started to say, ‘Dad's outside warming up the car.’ We started acknowledging her realities.”

After the siblings moved Florence into a caregiving facility, there was a moment where she thought there was a snake under her bed. "I said, ‘There's no snake.’ I looked under the bed, no snake. She kept getting more and more angry with me. And then my brother looked under the bed and said, ‘I see it, I'll kill it.’ We all followed his example."

While getting into Florence's mental space did not cure any symptoms, says Corcoran, "as loved ones, it made a heck of a difference to us caring for her. Because when Alzheimer's happened, the biggest shock is she lost most of her personality. And to have it creep away, little by little, is a consistent line of sadness." 

How did her personality change?
“She became very agitated about not being able to be as capable as she was — you have to realize my mother raised 10 kids in a little house. She ran the house like a boot camp,” Corcoran tells PEOPLE. “She was so capable of everything she did, very sure of herself. It seemed like she had endless time in her life for doing everything that needed to be done.”

But the agitation, Corcoran says, “was not her personality. She had never gotten agitated, no matter what was going on. She might leave the room, take a breath for a minute and come back and not be agitated. But that stopped happening.”

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Corcoran shared that when they put her mother into the caregiving home, “she turned to a different person. She was screaming over and over again, 'You don't care about me. You don't care about me.' She was angry, and we just didn't even recognize who was in front of us.”

It seemed more extreme than what they had expected from Alzheimer's. “It was too much anger, too much frustration, too much speaking out and too much unlike my mother's personality naturally. So we just didn't expect that.”

It's why she supports RecognizeAlzheimersAgitation.com, which is for other people caring for Alzheimer's dementia patients with agitation.

What is most misunderstood about the caregiver journey?
“The caregiver journey, I think, they literally interpret it: give care. But I don't think it's about that,” Corcoran says. “I think it's about giving compassion and understanding and empathy. That's really the most important thing, It's more important than changing the sheets — not that we didn’t have the sheets changed — but it's giving the understanding and the compassion for the world they're living in.”

“I really think that's what care is, to just have a world where people didn't steal her dignity. When you disagree with them, you write it off, you're not acknowledging their dignity. I think that's probably the most important piece.”

For more about caring for Alzheimer's dementia patients with agitation, visit RecognizeAlzheimersAgitation.com.