I recently read a toot about the burden of being a caregiver for a person with Alzheimer’s disease and can sympathize with their perspectives since I was once a caregiver for a parent with Alzheimer’s disease. My brother and I moved our parents into a retirement community when the symptoms of my father’s Alzheimer’s disease became too much for my mother to handle. My father had recently struck my sister-in-law. My mother lived in the assisted living part of the facility and my father moved into a memory care unit. My mother visited my dad almost daily. My brother and I visited him most weekends and took him out bowling or golfing. It was tiring and stressful—as working parents, my wife and I had two young children to drag along for those visits that occupied one day of most weekends. Yes, being a caregiver for a parent with Alzheimer’s was stressful for the 5-6 years the disease lasted until his death.
When we moved our father into the Alzheimer’s unit, he was too mentally incompetent to consent. My brother walked him through signing his name onto an admission form, letter by letter. Notably, no disability rights attorney or judge was there to object, to defend his civil rights. No disability rights advocates argued he would be better off homeless or imprisoned. I suspect this is how things work for most families that make the difficult choice to move an aging parent into such a place. My reason for bring up the absence of such bureaucratic impediments will be clearer a bit later in this thread.
My father lived in that memory care unit for the last 5 years of his life and my family was fortunate that he recognized us until about the last six weeks. On some days, he delusionally believed that he was back living in his childhood home with brothers and sister. On other days he was more in touch with reality. He probably would not have chosen to live the last years of his life in such a place. But he quickly got accustomed to it. When we returned from our bowling or golf outings with him, he willingly returned to his new home and waved goodbye with a smile on his face.
