“I must get home,” an Alzheimer’s patient insisted when I visited Mother at the nursing home.  “The children are coming home from school.”
She did this every afternoon, I learned.  About the time her children, during their school years, would have come home from school, she became restless, walking the hallway and insisting she must get home before the children did.  Some instinct made her aware that it was afternoon.  Her mind took her back to that era when her children were young.  (They now are adults with children of their own and are responsible for her care.)
Mother’s School Memories 
           My mom never insisted, while at …read more