No Saints around Here: A Caregiver’s Days

The Nursing Home on the Hill

59 THE NURSING HOME ON THE HILL March 26 Many of our friends believe I should be heading there today, driving James and his belongings to a nursing home. They seem to picture it as a pleasant, well-lit, homelike place on a hill, surrounded by landscaped grounds and tended by dedicated, sunny nurses, where James will be, eventually, fine. Just fine. Well looked after. “The adjustment might be difficult,” some will admit, “but he would get used to it. It might take some time. And of course you could visit all you want. You wouldn’t be deserting him. But you would be free at last. You deserve a life.” They pronounce that last sentence almost like a threat. One advocate encouragingly told me about a friend of hers who’d had a complicated operation and had to recuperate in a nursing home for several weeks. “Gerry actually enjoyed it,” my friend said. “She got great care, and she spent the time reading, watching movies, and just resting. I visited her once, and I was really impressed with the level of attention she got.” They don’t know. First, I’m not sure they know what the dementia section of a nursing home is really like. A year ago, watching James’s cognitive abilities noticeably decline again—they seem the nursing home on the hill 60 to fall sharply, level off, then fall once more—I decided I had better investigate the future possibility of a nursing home. I know that I cannot care for James at home under all circumstances. At some point I may need to concede. I had better be prepared. I chose two for visits. (I was so disheartened afterward that I decided to postpone my field studies a while longer.) The first was a very large, well-endowed, highly touted complex that offered assisted-living apartments as well as nursing care. Lakeview Manor (which had, as promised, partial views of a small lake) was known as the top choice in our city. Before my guide came to get me, I wandered around a little. The Manor did indeed have a very large open public space, though furnished with the overupholstered, tartan-plaid furniture and Early American coffee tables James loathed. Nobody was sitting in the chairs or on the sofas. I also couldn’t see anyone on the enclosed glass porch overlooking the lake. Perhaps on this winter day the room was too cold. I wondered if James would sit there in the summer. Summer in this part of the world isn’t very long. The whole place was eerily quiet. I poked my head in here and there. No one in the tiny library, either. I checked out the “family dining room,” where, my brochure said, its residents— I tried not to think of the word “inmates”—could entertain at private parties. The room was rather claustrophobic and quite dark because it had no windows. Maybe it would look more welcoming with its fluorescent light turned on. Maybe not. My guide, Alice, perky and informative, showed me through the whole complex. The one vacant assisted-living apartment I saw, though small, looked nice enough, especially if one had few possessions. But when I mentioned that James’s Parkinson’s had induced a certain amount of dementia, Alice said regretfully, “Then, of course, he couldn’t be in this section. You have to be mostly independent to live here. I’ll take you up to the Memory Floor.” the nursing home on the hill 61 The Memory Floor was supposed to evoke Parisian street life. Its halls had gay painted murals featuring sidewalk cafés, men in berets on bicycles, and rather demure cancan dancers. Public rooms carried names like “Montmartre” and “Bois de Bologne.” Nothing reminded me in the least of Paris. I saw one nearly empty room. “This resident is moving out today,” Alice said. I asked her where this patient was going, and Alice said apologetically she was not legally able to tell me. A locked ward? A funeral home? The room had one high window that included sky and trees, though not easily visible from the bed, and just enough space for a bed, chest of drawers, and an easy chair. Most furniture had been removed, but I am sure the room could also have held a television set and perhaps a bookcase. I thought of our wide...