Why are some people in nursing homes “lonely”? Meaning little or no family ever visits them?
The popular idea is their kids are cruel and just dumped them off and dont care.
However other reasons:
What do you all think?
You listed the main reasons. There is a great deal of dissatisfaction in these facilities, loneliness just adds to that. It sucks to get old, it gets worse when your freedom is limited, you aren’t living with family, you face health problems, and you see nothing better in your future. Then start adding on loneliness, monotony, and then possibly poor treatment by staff and other residents and things look pretty bad.
My father lives in, not exactly a nursing home, but what’s called a “memory care” home. Physically he’s in pretty decent shape (for 86). He does suffer from senile dementia and cannot live on his own. He’s been there since January.
He has frequent visitors. I live not too far away (in NYC), as does one of my brothers. He has a (very much younger) sister who splits her time between Cambridge, MA and Brooklyn, and she visits pretty often.
He has two other children, who do not live nearby. One, who lives in the South, visits every four or five months. There’s a daughter who has never visited. I don’t know what her story is.
But there are residents there who have never, as far as I can tell, had a visitor.
I do not understand how a family could abandon someone like that, no matter what has happened in the past. Yes, I know that there are things that are so bad that the children/siblings/whatever never want to see that person again, but not everyone in this place can be a child molester or whatever.
I have been in about 10 different nursing homes in my life. 3 were for family the others were for other people (parents of friends, church etc).
I wouldn’t wish that existence on my worst enemy. I am not 100 % sure of the total time someone is committed to one and the time they die. I am pretty sure it is less than a year. My own father lasted less than 3 months. The reason no one is happy in a nursing home is you know there is no other alternative and people don’t tend to go until they have exhausted every other preferred living arrangement.
Also no one has mentioned the simple fact of just how expensive they are.
I don’t think one needs to be a child molester to be cut off. Just being a general jerk who makes your children’s lives less pleasant is a perfectly valid reason for a child to cut off contact and not see a parent again to me - I don’t believe blood entitles someone to treat another poorly and I don’t believe kids owe anything to parents for raising/supporting them in childhood (something it is both the parents’ duty and legal obligation to do and that the child had zero say in). And if they have cut off contact, they wouldn’t even know parent was in nursing home.
But there are so many in-betweens, too. From parents who stole kids’ identities and ran up debt to those who sabotaged romantic relationships or education plans to those who just berated the kids constantly and so on and so on.
Possible reason 5 - Has completely unrealistic idea of how safe they would be if allowed to go home and therefore spends all of every visit begging or raging to go home.
Some WAGs:
Family lives nearby, but they stay away because the nursing home creeps them out. Or seeing their infirm loved one creeps them out.
Family lives nearby, but they stay away because they don’t realize their loved one is so lonely. Like, maybe before he went into the nursing home, Uncle Leo was a big social butterfly, always staying busy with this or that, always with his running buddies. Maybe Uncle Leo was the type to stay for Christmas dinner just long enough to have dessert, and then he was always off to another party. So the family is used to thinking of Uncle Leo as someone who loves them, but isn’t emotionally dependent on them. They may believe that just visiting him at the nursing home at Christmastime is all he really wants or needs. And he might be too prideful to admit to them that he’s lonely.
I was estranged from my father for the last year or so before he died, and my sister and my mother for longer times than that. With me, what it came down to was that I told him to accept the VA’s offer of mental health care (which he very much needed), and he said that he would instead take the advice of men he respects. I.e., not me. So I told him that if he respects me, he needs to prove it by taking my advice, and that I wouldn’t talk further with him until he told me that he was accepting mental health care. I’d hoped that it would shock him into taking action. It didn’t work.
For my mom, a few years earlier than that, the complete breaking point (long after the separation, divorce, and annulment) came when he asked for her help with grocery shopping (he takes pride in being clueless about “women’s work” like that), and when she did so, he referred to it as a “date”. She decided that she couldn’t let him keep misconstruing things that way.
For my sister, several years earlier than Mom, it came one Christmas, when she wanted a certain power tool. But he couldn’t bring himself to give a tool to a woman, so he instead addressed it to “<oldest daughter>'s younger brother”. Who didn’t even exist, at the time. Meanwhile, he also ignored my sister’s very clear and simple request for <oldest daughter>'s present, and ended up giving her a second copy of a VHS tape that she already had.
Deafness, hearing issues even with hearing aides means so many residents are totally isolated from their peers there. The other hearing residents are not interested in conversation. Add dementia issues and they are indeed lonely in their isolation. Even when family visits. For us, we only dare visit Mom one at a time because she gets very very angry when we speak to each other in her presence. And it’s a huge chore to visit. She stinks, body odor, bad body odor. Staff can only do so much.we can do just a little to clean her up before she gets combative.
Even if they have 5 children who spend two hours a week with them it doesn’t really add up to much. Once they lose the ability to run simple errands or do even the smallest activities, there are a lot of hours to fill.
Well there are two theories. One is that I am a horrible ungrateful girl who was born bad. The other is that my mother really screwed up while raising me. Or maybe it’s both!
At any rate, I did visit her; I took her grandchildren to visit her. I didn’t do this often, because it was no accident that I had moved 1000 miles away as soon as I could. I don’t know that the visits did much for her, and they didn’t do much for me. Maybe alleviate some of that guilt for being a horrible ungrateful kid who was born bad.
The other non-visitors were just mean people who had a grudge against her for some reason or another. Or they were raised badly and just couldn’t be bothered to show up for a visit. Because they were selfish. Whatever.
Another issue is where they choose to be for their nursing home. Being in a smaller town might mean flights that are eyewateringly expensive, especially to bring a family. And, of course, Americans don’t get a lot of time off from work. If you’ve got a spouse that wants a romantic getaway every year and then a family vacation every year with the kids, it’s sometimes hard to fit it into the schedule. Even if you’ve earned the time off from work, some bosses are just jerks when you want time off,negotiating peace in the Middle East would be easier than a 3 day weekend.
I can totally understand how someone can make the decision that their presence no longer matters to their severely demented loved one and thus it would be best for their own mental health for them to start the grieving process.
My father’s sister has Alzheimers. She doesn’t remember him or her doting husband or anyone else. At this stage, she is barely verbal. Despite the long distance, my father visits whenever he can. I think he’s awesome for doing that. But one day he told me he doesn’t visit her for her sake, but for his own. He’d feel guilty if he didn’t visit. Sometimes he doesn’t even go into her room; he just looks at her through the window in the door.
I’m not gonna lie. It would be very hard for me to visit any of my immediate family members if they were in a state like my aunt’s. I wouldn’t have a hard time visiting them if I believed my presence was comforting. But if my presence only brought disorientation and disruption? I can’t see myself being strong enough to handle those kinds of visits.
Yes, I can see that. If you visit and they just go “who are you”?
Please watch this video by Reba called “All Dressed Up”.
This was my grandmother. She fell, outside, in Ohio in winter, and crawled into the house. And at the time she grudingly agreed to go to a nursing home. There’s no one else in the area and moving in with my parents would mean moving several states away where she would know only my parents.
Even when she would have visitors, who would report to my dad that they visited, verified by the nursing home, she would say no one visited her. She wasn’t bad enough for the memory unit, but her memory issues were enough that she would forget to eat, take her medicene or forget that she had taken her medicene.
Even the day she died she was saying she was ready to go back home. Her home that had been sold and was being renovated.
And even though she did have visitors, she basically refused to socialize with the other residents, some of whom she had known and visited before she moved in.
I agree some of these people bring it on themselves by being hard to be around. They throw guilt trips or say bad things or whatever.
My mom went into the recuperative care wing of a nursing home for 5 weeks.
It’s not much better than a nursing home room except they get physical therapy in recuperative care. Mom finally got well enough to come back home. She had to meet with the doctors and nurses to get cleared for release.
Mom couldn’t walk when she went in. She walked out 5 weeks later after a lot of PT.
The last time I visited my father for Christmas, he and his wife fecked off to a friend’s house for 11 hours on Christmas Day, leaving Celtling and I to enjoy our Christmas in their otherwise empty home. I already knew that he held no value at all on spending time with me, but after months of begging and guilting he had convinced me that seeing their Granddaughter actually mattered to them, and I was willing to make the effort to give their relationship a chance. I didn’t drive 8.5 hours with a toddler to house-sit on Christmas Day.
This layers, of course, upon a lifetime of miscellaneous violence, neglect and disrespect. People like that don’t get more visits.
A good friend of mine is going through this, exactly, with his mother. His mother has been dealing with declining health for years, and suffered several falls that she wouldn’t tell her son about (and, as her strength in her arms and legs is gone, she had to call a neighbor to come and help her get up).
She was in an assisted-living home for about a year, but as her condition has continued to worsen, she no longer was independent enough for that home, and had to move her to a full-on nursing home. To be able to afford all that, he had to sell her house, which she continues to complain to him about at every opportunity. She continues to be convinced that it’s just a matter of time until she’s “gotten better” enough to “go home” again, though I imagine it’s just that she hates the fact that she’s no longer independent.
The nursing home she’s in is about 20 minutes from her son’s house, but he isn’t able to visit every day, due to work and other life responsibilities, as well as the fact that dealing with her is emotionally taxing as hell for him. She has no other local relatives, and her friends who are still alive are mostly older and infirm, as well, so they rarely visit.