My MIL spent 6 or 7 years in an assisted living facility. She had friends she could socialize with, decent food in a dining room with the other residents, outings. Much more than if she were living with us, where she would be home alone for most of the day.
She had a gradual but steady decline over that time until she ended up in a nursing home. My wife would visit regularly (at least once a week). Other family not so much. Her decline continued. We would measure her decline by how long it took her to start repeating a conversation. At the beginning it was about 10 minutes. Once it got down to around 2 minutes we realized that she had no idea of time anymore. We started spacing visits out further and further; each visit was identical, no recognition that time had passed. We’d tell her that it had been three weeks since we were there, and it just confused her - weren’t we just there the other day?
During this time I had been delaying a job-related relocation across the country. We were worried about how that would affect her, but after flying back to visit her for the first time in three months it was back to “weren’t you just here the other day?” At that point we stopped worrying.
Even to the very end she had one or two friends in the nursing home and certain staff members who she really got along with. Her friends were in a similar condition - I can’t imagine their conversations. At least they never ran out of things to say…
Yes, that’s my father. He went from a hospital stay into a residential rehab facility, where he received excellent care and made an amazing physical recovery.
But mentally, he was not able to go back home. He never did – he went from the rehab place, were he was for a couple of months, to the facility in which he lives now.
A parent need not physically molest a child to completely alienate them. a lifetime of thoughtlessly shredding a kid’s self-esteem (or deliberately spewing verbal abuse) is plenty of motivation to stay away. On the flip side, there are loving parents who raised children that grew up to be selfish assholes who never visit. Sometimes it’s a little bit of both.
In my case, I was blessed with two parents who gave me a great childhood and set me up for a great life, but geography limits how much time I have been able to spend with them in their golden years. My career put me 600 miles away from them, and about a decade ago they moved even farther away from me to live a few miles from my sister, who has been very dedicated to their well-being, visiting them almost daily. We now have one parent left alive, in assisted living, and I try to fly out there about every three months for a long weekend. These are good visits, but a few days’ presence followed by ~90 days’ absence is still pretty sparse.
Neither the parent nor the child have to be bad people. Sometimes the parent doesn’t remember how often anyone comes to visit. Even if they do, the number of hours the child can spend with the parent is nothing compared to the number of hours where the parent has nothing to do.
Plus it can be so exhausting. Forcing yourself to visit someone who can only complain that they want to go home, when they never can, or who complains that you never visit them when you are there visiting them, is hard.
My grandmother lived in a nursing home for the last six or seven years of her life. And my parents visited her faithfully every Thursday, and tried to get her out to parties at their house. But they got almost nothing out of it besides the knowledge that they were doing their duty. Her short-term memory was shot, so she couldn’t talk about anything that happened more than ten minutes ago, or less than forty years. My folks liked to take me along when I was in town, because I didn’t have to hear the same stories as often, and I could get her going on stuff from her life and just let her ramble.
Of course, she had no filter whatever, and didn’t recognize that she was talking to her grandson, who didn’t necessarily need to hear the details of everything, including my grandparents’s divorce and her relationship with her long-time boyfriend and God knows what all. But she was entertained, and it sure killed the hour or so and off-loaded the effort of the visit from my folks.
“I hope I die before I get old” used to sound silly to me, but I am starting to see something in it. My mother-in-law spent hours every day in the nursing home with my father-in-law, for years. Then he died, and the reduction in her stress levels was unmistakeable. But she would never, ever admit it.
So I smoke cigars. If that means I die before my brain does, that’s a feature, not a bug.
If they weren’t like that before, or were a bit like that before but are now much worse, this may be caused by dementia. It’s not the person saying those things, it’s the disease.
That unfortunately doesn’t make it easy for either the demented or their friends and family. But it can be a little easier on the latter to know that it’s not your mother (or whoever) in their full mind talking to/about you like that. And if that’s what’s going on, they’re not “bringing it on themselves” any more than a person with a broken leg has “brought on themselves” that they can’t walk. (Some people, I agree, do bring it on themselves by a history of abuse committed when they were fully themselves.)
Having said that: people do what they can do, but can’t do more than that. It’s not reasonable to expect family or friends to give their lives over entirely to caretaking or visiting; and any given frequency of visits is going to be a lot harder for some people to pull off than others.
In my experience, an elderly relative moving into a nursing home is often preceded by the death of a spouse so they are already dealing with sudden loneliness. Also, at least in my case, there has always been a certain optimism in the back of my mind that I may, possibly, live in a better place someday and I would guess that being put in a home would probably squelch that.
My Yaya didn’t have any memory problems while in the Old Folks’ Home that she hadn’t had before. The only day she didn’t have any relatives visiting her was on Monday (when she had both a doctor’s visit and the hairdresser). And yet, she complained that nobody visited her, or that we didn’t visit “enough”, or speak of a visit which had taken place within the last few days as if it had taken place back when the first Ramesses was Pharaoh. But you know what? She did the same when she was living in her house. She bitched about everybody and everything; you know what? She did the same when she was living in her house. She considered anything in which she was not interested as a waste of time, resources, money; this included books, news, movies, TV and the life of anybody other than herself. You know what? I imagine by now you do know what…
Here is another reason. The staff may go out of their way to discourage visiting. I have a friend whose wife has been in a nursing home for several years with Alzheimer’s. He goes to visit every day, but they have increasingly restricted what he can do. He is not allowed in her room. This was precipitated by an incident in which he slammed the door on another resident who was hitting on her (for an 80 something she is quite attractive) and the other guy fell down. He cannot accompany her to the dining room. They claim he is force feeding her. He says he was merely helping her eat. He is not permitted to take her out of the building, which she enjoyed in nice weather. He cannot take her on the stairs (once the elevator refused to work and he did so). He claims they are on the verge of forbidding him to visit entirely. He commented that he sees very few visitors at any time, so their tactics seem to work. The facility has the reputation of being the best one in town.
Some times she recognizes him; oftimes not. Regardless she is constantly begging him to take her home.
Way back when I was an orderly in a nursing home or two, I saw first hand what losing friends over and over and over again in a short period of time can do to a person. I was young and healthy, and watching people who I knew on a first name basis die frequently wore on me, so you can only imagine what it does to those who cohabitate in such an environment. Sometimes all it takes to break your heart is a freshly made bed and a naked desk.
My niece’s husband is a CNA, and he works in a nursing home. He has one of the biggest hearts I’ve ever seen, and I know that it really hurts him every time one of his patients dies; he’s tried to adopt a detatchment about it (“it happens, it’s part of the job,”) but I suspect that that continuous series of losses will be what causes him to leave the field.
Yes indeed. My father’s first wife (my mother) died quite young in the early 80s. He remarried eventually, and his second wife died just a few years ago, at which point his decline began, which eventually led to him having to live in the memory care home he’s at now.
Certainly the death of a spouse can take quite a toll.
I don’t know your friend, or his situation, of course, and I am not saying anything about him.
But difficult visitors are a reality.
That said, in the course of moving my father into his new home at the memory care facility, and visiting him there several times a week since January, I have observed that some visitors are extremely difficult for the staff to deal with. Some treat staff members as servants, and make unreasonable demands. Some refuse to observe basic rules that are obviously completely sensible (like notifying staff if a visitor takes a resident out of the facility). Or they’ll bring food that is not part of a medically supervised diet. Stuff like that. I’m aware of one family that was ultimately banned from coming as a group because they were so obnoxious. They can come one at a time, or in pairs, but that’s all.
Most nursing homes of any size have a variety of activities available to residents – bingo, crafts projects, movies, concerts, games, church services, lectures/classes. Staff members are usually good at reminding patients about upcoming activities and encouraging them to attend.
True – but those activities may or may not be anything that a particular person wants to spend much time at.
If the person’s preferred way to spend time was riding horses, or going for long walks whether in the woods or all over downtown, or repairing old cars or old airplanes: being offered bingo games or basic pottery classes may not seem like much of a substitute. Even if the person wants to raise vegetables or play with the cats: while more places do now offer such opportunities, a lot of them don’t, or there may be ten square feet of growing area available per person and/or one cat for a couple of hundred people and two dogs who come in for three hours every other week.
Remember when I said the sight of an empty well-made bed can break a heart?
Right as I was getting ready to hit the sack last night I got called in to fill in someone else’s shift, so I’ve been up for 27 hours so far…and I just saw this article about Miguel Cervantes’ 3 year old daughter dying.. I was holding it together just fine.
Until I saw the picture of her bed.