The nursing home seems to be a place where one goes to wait to die. Everything you own is taken from you. You can't live alone so you can't have your house. You might get lost so you can't have your car. People even exchange your keys for keys that won't work. You can't keep your valuable jewelry because you might flush it down the toilet for safe-keeping. You can't cook because you might forget you left a pan on the stove with the burner on and could start a fire, burn down the house. And your kids have lives to live. They can't live those lives if you are a burden for them.
Mom calmed considerably when she went to live at the nursing home. There have been some Sundowners episodes, taken care of with a dose of Atavan. Her roommate died. They were neighbors for decades, roommates for a year. Mom didn't remember. Any of it. And wonders who the other woman is who sleeps in her room.
Dad has been gone nearly a year and a half. Mom complains to the aides, "When I get my hands on that man I'm going to kill him for dumping me here."
But when I am there she says, "Bill is dead, isn't he?" Yes. "What I really don't understand, though, is why my mother doesn't come to see me." She's gone, Mom. She died in 1983. "Oh. I didn't remember that. I just thought if that's the way she wants to be I won't go to see her, either."
And to her roommate, "I haven't seen my daughter in a long time." That's not true, Paula says. She was here to see you and left a note in your notebook for you. So Mom gets the notebook and begins to read.
My brother, Bill, insisted on a notebook so visitors could sign and date it. That way Mom would see that we'd been there to see her. Most of the notes are from me.
"I didn't know about the notebook," Richard said. I probably forgot to tell him. I don't have Alzheimer's, do I?
"I will probably die here," Mom says wistfully. She probably is right. The nursing home seems to be a place where one goes to wait to die.
