Taking Alzheimer’s Patients Home for Thanksgiving

Once your family member has begun living in a nursing home, should you take them home for the holidays?  This becomes a difficult question and has to be answered on a person to person basis. 

You can’t automatically say, “We must bring Mother (Father, Uncle Harry, Aunt Susie, etc.) home for Thanksgiving dinner.”  Also, you’re not being a terrible daughter, son, or spouse if you don’t.

Once Mother began living at the nursing home, I didn’t bring her home.  We joined her there for the holidays.  The nursing home provided special meals, parties, and festive celebrations for families.  My husband and I visited her there.  Often our daughter and grandchildren joined us once they moved nearby.

*Mother would have become too disoriented after the routine of the nursing home.  Even taking her outside and wheeling her around the garden (in warm weather) confused her.

*Eventually Mother could no longer walk.  She had to be lifted from her wheel chair to a car, a bed, a couch.  It was more than I could do physically.

*She appeared to enjoy the activities at the home and thanked us for taking her out to eat when we dined in the attractively decorated dining room.

Although the holidays weren’t the same as those we once celebrated in Mother’s home 275 miles away (which had to be sold when we moved her to our state) or when we gathered in our home, we learned to find enjoyment in the celebrations at the nursing home.

We discovered that life changes whether one has Alzheimer’s or not.  We change, children grow and leave home, parents need care…life isn’t static.  So I learned to enjoy the small joys at “this moment in time” and bring Mother joy wherever she was.  I discovered that Thanksgiving was for giving thanks that I had a mother to visit.