We set it up on the headboard of her bed in the nursing home. The plan was for her to wake up each morning and to see pictures of her family and close friends. The idea was to trigger happy, meaningful memories in her mind, or what was left of it given the advanced stage of her disease.
The medical staff at the facility at first thought it was a good idea, but after a few weeks they called my wife and suggest that we take down what we called her memory board. They said that she would see the pictures we had clipped to the headboard and get angry because she didn’t know who any of the people in the photos were and wanted to know why the photos were there. They told my wife that her Alzheimer’s had progressed to the point that, while physically she was in good shape for a woman her age, mentally she was gone.
That afternoon, my wife and I drove to the nursing home and took down the photos and the lights from her headboard. She was irritated because two strangers were in her room messing things up. We put everything from the memory board into a box and as we were getting ready to leave, my wife, tears flowing down her cheeks, reached out for the old lady’s hand and said, “We love you, Grammy. We’ll be back to visit with you again this weekend.”
Grammy pulled her hand away, gave her granddaughter a nasty look, and angrily said, “Who are you and how did you get into my house?”
Written for this week’s Photo Challenge from Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie. Photo credit: Oleg Zaicev on Pexels.com.
Sadly this is a true story for many
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Yes, I know. 😢
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That’s very sad and it also seems to be a feature of the disease that some people become angry and moody and display a totally different personality. I know of a couple of cases among family or friends where this happened.
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It is a devastating disability.
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Alzheimer’s is such a loss.
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Yes it is.
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☹️
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😭
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My mother-in-law had it…. she would even see strangers in the mirrors. Very sad disease!
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Very cool idea 💡 I did a memory box for my dad with dementia 🙂
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