Ok Friends, I REALLY need some advice! My mom is in an Assisted Living now and wants to come home. She has been in there for four months and loved it. She’s active and participated in everything! Her friends have told me recently that she has been miserable lately and has been crying, asking for her mom and dad. She’s calling relatives asking if her parents are alive and telling them she hasn’t seen me in several days and wants to come home. I go EVERYDAY except 1 Day I take for myself. I started working full time ( which I haven’t done in 20 years) so I can do something besides go there all the time during the day. I go everyday after work to visit. I do her laundry and try and fix her room up when I go because she loses things constantly. Hides things all the time and her drawers are a complete mess with everything that she hides in them. I know she is in a good place, gets 24 hour care but my heart is breaking that she wants to come home. She tells me “it’s a cave”. Her sister calls me constantly asking me if my mom could come there for a couple weeks because she can’t stand how she’s hurting. She visited her one time since she’s been in there and let’s me know. She lives two hours away! She’s 86 and my moms 85! Drives me crazy.
This is so painful seeing my mom so sad sometimes , then happy, so confused and disorganized, it’s killing me😞
If no UTI, involve the geriatric psychiatrist; most ALs have one on call.
Been though similar - uncle actually packed his case ! Keep talking to the folk that are there to assist and explain your concerns. They can help to remind your mum how often you do visit and try jogging her memory of something you did together the previous day.
You know she’s got a good place - maybe something triggered her desire to leave? In my uncles case it turned out that having never been married when the care wanted to help him wash, he rebelled.
Had a wonderful battle of wits re wearing incontinence pads too!
I used to “watch” countdown whilst doing other jobs for my uncle. I’d note the day and time and put some words and maths answers down. He had a paper each day so I could show him I’d been the day previous. I also kept a diary there to try and remind him of things and used that to show entries I’d made as a result of a previous time visiting.
Might help - might not.
Give the medical side a chance to help and grit your teeth a while longer. She may be happier after medical checks and treatment have had time to work.
I always treated it that as long as when I visited I got him to smile or even laugh at times - I was on a winner. Be kind to yourself and enjoy that one day break - you deserve a medal
And you love her. And it is "killing" you.
But there is no answer to it.
This is aging when their minds go and they are still here. When they are no one you really recognize except sometime, and those few times are the pain of it all.
I think that you know there is not an answer.
I think you know that not everything can be fixed.
I think you know that this is pain, and there is no getting away from it, there is no changing it, there is no fixing it.
And I think that knowing is making you desperate.
It's time to know that you can feel desperate, and that is OK; you can sink onto the bed in a ball of depression and let the waves of hopelessness wash right over you, and that is OK.
What isn't OK is to think that there is an answer and that answer is to take her home, to care for her, to sacrifice you life (or the life of someone else who thinks THEY can do that).
I am so sorry. Not everything in life can be fixed, and with those we love we want to think we can have/must have the answer. There isn't an answer for aging in this country, or perhaps in any other. There isn't an answer to have to see everything we were stripped from us piece by piece of loss, until, if our hearts are strong enough, we end up speechless in a bed in the fetal position. In the same stage of life we ENTERED. The full circle. Birth, to death. Where we all came from. Where we are all going.
I am so sorry for the pain. For all that is un-answerable, the pain is the worst of it. Allow yourself to mourn and cry. Acknowledge that you are not god, you are not a fairy with a magic wand, you cannot fix all this. I am so sorry.