Elderly parents in nursing homes
You may recall I talked about Slouching Mom’s touching recount of her elderly mother in the hospital.
Her mom is in a nursing home and once again, I could have written much of this myself when my mother was in a nursing home for a while, especially about meal time. For some reason, that’s one of the hardest parts:
Stepping out of the elevator and onto my mother’s floor, I spy her and the other patients eating dinner in the dining room. It is a peculiar and wrenching sight. Fifty people in wheelchairs pulled up to tables. All wearing bibs so they don’t spill on themselves. The bibs cue me to expect child-like babbling — happy noises. But instead there is absolute silence.
There’s nothing like having a parent in a nursing home, and that’s not a “nursing homes are all bad” statement, either. It’s just an experience you’ll never forget. Like her mother, mine was among the youngest patients in the nursing home, and whatever it was that I saw in her when she allowed them to put a bib on her will stay with me forever.
They say you go through the terrible twos three times in life.
I just finished reading a new book “MEMORY LESSONS” - by Jerald Winakur, a geriatrician. He eloquently and poetically describes the challenges faced not only taking care of the elderly, but also in taking care of his own seriously failing parents. As a psychologist who deals with the elderly and their families, I found this beautiful and very helpful. Dr. Charles Merrill