Halloween for Old Folks

This is the decoration outside the door to the Memory Care Unit at Atria:

I found macabre humor in the idea of skeletons hanging on this particular wing of Atria, where everyone is--let's be honest--waiting to die.

I did take exception to the scarecrow sitting in the chair across from this display.

She's sitting in the chair where I sit while waiting for someone to come and let me into the locked unit.  Harumph.

There are a few skeletons and pumpkins hanging along the halls, but I suspect nobody knows what day it is and has no concept of Halloween.  I know my mother didn't, when I went to see her yesterday.

I hadn't seen her in almost a week but fortunately she didn't realize that.  I told her about my fall and how my back hurt too much to walk the long walk down to the Memory Care unit (the back is fine now, by the way) and she was solicitous, which interrupted any feelings she might have had about my not being there in such a long time.

The visit was back to the usual discussion of age, how old she is, she can't be that old, etc. She asked me what I had been doing with "Mom" lately.  She misses her mother so much and occasionally thinks she sees her, though it's not in a hallucination sort of way, but more when she is asleep.  Of all the relatives who have gone before her, her mother is the one she most wants to see again.  She never mentions her father.

She talked about how many activities there were to do at Atria and smugly and proudly let me know that she never participated in ANY of them.  That always makes me sad, knowing how many opportunities she missed since she moved to Atria.  She wouldn't even go to the theater to see a movie, she was so uncomfortable, afraid she would do something wrong--and this was when she had it all together mentally!

I remember how involved she was in so many things when she lived alone.  Her calendar had an activity for every day of the week, it seemed.  Lunches, fashion shows, meetings, volunteer work.  But she lived in the mobile home park for a long time -- maybe 20 years? -- and never participated in any of the many activities there and refused to get to know her neighbors, so maybe this isn't so much a dementia/Alzheimers thing as it is a personality thing.  Still it seems a shame that she never took advantage of anything she was paying big bucks to have available to her!