Once Mother began residing in a nursing home, I never took her out nor brought her to my home.
“How terrible!” you might say.
However, Mother made the nursing home her world. She created a home, in her mind, that was her former home or sometimes her girlhood home. She had been through upheavals when I moved her from her home in another state to mine, then shuttled her to daycare at a nursing home. Because of my work, she sometimes stayed with my neighbor. All of this was confusing to her.
When she resided permanently in the nursing home, she seemed to settle in and create her own world. I was fortunate because she never talked about leaving, neither to me nor to the staff.
So why should I move her to my home for holidays? It would only confuse her, I realized. Instead we visited her, attended parties and dinners with her at the home. She seemed to think we’d taken her out to dinner at a nice restaurant when we all ate at a private table in the holiday feted dining room.
Not everyone adapt as well as Mother did. However, I was advised that if I allowed her to adjust and to develop her own patterns, she would do so, and we could set new traditions for the holidays. I look back upon these occasions with fond memories and have photos of our holidays together at the nursing home.
Give this some thought if you feel guilt ridden to bundle your Alzheimer’s patient up and take him/her to what you think are pleasurable occasions for them. Perhaps you should think in terms of the “new norm” of the Alzheimer’s world instead.
So glad I found you today. My mother has AD and has been in a nursing home for well over a year. Last year I took Mom home for the holidays, but I knew it would be the last time…. like your mother, that small wing of the facility has become her world, and it’s best for her at this point to not be taken out. She is simply too confused otherwise, and it serves no positive purpose for her. We had a similar experience at the holiday dinner in the nursing home… we went to a different wing, with tables beautifully decorated, and she thought we had taken her out altogether. She enjoyed it, but when we returned to her room, she had no orientation at all. She has so little anyway, she often thinks she’s somewhere brand new, has been out or just arrived at this “new” place…. her memories of home are from 50 years ago, and even those aren’t clear. She has no real understanding that it’s a holiday. So yes, I understand your point and agree with you. Usually, the people who judge others about these things have no real concept of how middle and late stage AD affects someone. Or perhaps they would take a family member out in spite of the fact that it may not be what is best for the Alzheimer’s patient, out of some misguided sense of guilt or duty, or pressure from others. It’s a lonely, sometimes misunderstood road we walk, isn’t it? Never more so than at this time of year.
Thank you so much, Kate, for sharing your experiences with your mom. Hopefully what you and I have experienced with our moms at holiday time will help others as they cope with a parent’s or spouse’s Alzheimer’s and make them feel less guilty when they can’t follow the usual traditions. Making new memories can be enjoyable, too.