Will I Keep Any Photos of My Mother From Her Time in Memory Care?
Maybe, but I don’t think so
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My mother suffers from vascular dementia and macular degeneration and has now lived in a Memory Care facility for more than a year.
My entire family is lucky that we were able to get Mom a spot in a care facility that is close to all her children, and which largely seems to employ some of the most compassionate and loving caregivers and staff we have ever seen. There are many social activities for all the home’s residents, and periodically the activities director will send us photos of my mother attending one of the programs.
I know many families want such pictures, and I appreciate the effort it takes to send them.
Does it make me a monster, though, if I don’t want to see these pictures, and don’t envision keeping them after my mom is gone?
My mother, like many people, never wanted to go to the nursing home or any kind of memory care facility. Like most kids, I never wanted her to end up in one.
But after a couple of years of helping care for Mom in her own home, with my siblings and I eventually trying to cover 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (while several of us were also raising grade-school-age children), we realized we couldn’t do it anymore.
One of my sisters even floated the idea that Mom could come live in her house (and the rest of us could then take turns being with Mom there when my sister had appointments or other commitments), but Mom absolutely refused to even listen to this idea. None of us were surprised by that; one of my mother’s most enduring beliefs is in her own ability to be independent. Even now, a year after living in Memory Care, and at a point in her dementia when she no longer realizes what time of day it is, what season it is, or even where she is, she tells us on a daily basis: “Just drop me off at home. I was doing fine there.”
After Mom got COVID and took a bad fall in the autumn of 2022, however, it became clear that something had to change. It was not easy, but we helped her move, first into an Assisted Living apartment, and then, a scant two months later, into the Memory Care facility that she lives in currently.
And when I say “helped her move,” I mean “we moved her.”
You can currently tell my mom, several times per visit, the name of the facility that she is in, or that she is in a “care home,” or the “nursing home,” but she doesn’t really seem to understand that. (We don’t bring it up — she asks. Endlessly.) She knows she is not in her own home, but she seems to persist in thinking that she is on the worst vacation she has ever taken in her life.
I can’t blame her. I know none of it makes any sense to her.
Even if she were not suffering from cognitive decline, nothing in my mom’s life would have prepared her for life in such an institution. She never lived alone until after my father died. Before that she had always lived with family members, and, through her strong partnership with my farmer father, exerted a lot of control over how she lived her life and structured her days.
Her life was not easy. She grew up on a farm, and she married a farmer. She worked all the time, but she also benefitted from that labor. She and my dad ran a successful dairy farm. She raised six kids, all of whom settled near her as adults. She even started her own business selling produce at a farm market, which gave her social interaction in her later years. She had some health challenges, but nothing chronic or debilitating that impaired her ability to do her jobs. She had control over what she ate and when. She rarely had to depend on others for physical help. She didn’t suffer fools, and if she didn’t like you, you generally knew it.
Now?
Now she goes to a dining room with 30 other people and eats whatever she is served. She sits at a table with three other women who seem mostly to annoy her. She is nearly blind from her macular degeneration and can’t participate in most craft or other activities, and most likely wouldn’t want to even if she could. (“Why are we doing this? Isn’t there some work around I could do?”) She is still mobile, but is suffering from increasing urinary and bowel incontinence.
She is not in control of anything, really, and for a person who liked to be in control, that is soul-destroying.
How do I know this?
Because I am just like her.
I love my mom. For many years in my life, through high school and college and beyond, she was my best friend. We thought alike about almost everything. Even later in our relationship, when some of my ideas and beliefs began to change, we still got along. Hardly a day goes by even now when I don’t remember something bitter or hilarious or hilariously bitter that my mom once said, and laugh.
But then someone from my mom’s facility (or my siblings) will text me a picture of her attending an activity, and although I always look at them, I often delete them shortly thereafter.
Lately I have started wondering, should I be deleting these? She is still my mother, and this is a phase of her life. Maybe, when she’s gone, I’ll be glad to have these pictures that show her “having a good time.”
Sometimes she doesn’t look terribly unhappy. I know she still enjoys her sweets, so any picture of her that is taken at birthday or holiday parties invariably shows her eating her cake with admirable gusto.
But mostly these pictures make me terribly, terribly sad.
To me, she doesn’t even look like my mother anymore. She is wearing the clothing we bought for her when she moved to Memory Care (at home she had been wearing the same worn elastic-waist pants and flannel shirts with holes in them for years — “I’m going to die before I need new clothes”). Now she wears what I think of as her “institution” pajama pants and other interchangeable pants and brightly colored soft knit shirts that she didn’t pick out herself.
Her hair is cut short, so her ears and nose look more prominent than they used to. Her hands, which had been such strong and square worker’s hands, even up until six months ago, are increasingly frail and clenched. She has started to take more falls (another horrifying aspect of aging), and sometimes the pictures reflect bruises and black eyes.
Mostly, though, there is no spark in her eyes. In a lot of the photos, her mouth is set in a thin, serious line. She looks in the photos exactly how she sounds when I visit — unhappy, angry at her loss of control, anxious to go home (which will never be possible), and desperately lost.
There is no huge tragedy in this situation. Mom is lucky enough to have a warm room and her own bed and largely compassionate caregivers, and it is a testament to her hard work that she has the resources to pay for those things.
She is still my mother, and still the “same person” she always was. All of her kids coordinate our efforts, so one of us is at the home to see her every day. At those visits, we do all we can to try to keep her feelings of confusion, anger, anxiety, and fear at bay.
But I don’t think we succeed.
I think the pictures are proof of that, and I can’t bear to look at them.
I don’t think I’ll ever look at these pictures with anything but overwhelming sadness. Until that changes, I will just keep hitting “delete.”