Do you have any regrets for putting your parents in a nursing home

In a way I do, at least in the beginning. I was her beneficiary and I knew that if she stayed at home all her money would go to her at-home care, and when that ran out, my husband and I would be footing the bill as we already were for his own mother. It would be putting us in a deep financial hole that I didn’t feel was fair to my husband who has worked his ass off his entire life since age 14. These are all my “excuses” for allowing medicade  to pick up the tab for a woman who paid into the system her entire life also, since age 16.

What I find surprising, in retrospect, is how much I was in denial about her health. I always pride myself on being so brutally honest about facing the truth, but when it came to my own mother, I actually never thought she was as “bad off” as she really was; so I would feel guilty that she should be left with 2 other “out of it” roommates in a nursing home. I went there almost every day, engaged her in Bingo and all the other activities they offered, and refused to notice how under par her participation was.

For years I would tease her that if she ever stopped playing scrabble, I’d know it was time to call the undertaker. We played Scrabble all day, almost every day, for the last ten years of her life that she relocated from FL to CA (before the nursing home). We would call ourselves “Scrabble Sluts” and stay up til 2 or 3 a.m. hard at work playing cut-throat games. But, it was in the nursing home, when she started playing her own weird game that I could no longer deny the writing on the wall. Still, I felt guilty then and still feel a twinge now and then until I snap myself out of it and take a realistic look at the facts. The woman was in no condition to be at home the last 18 months of her life, so let her, and it, RIP.