A Reprieve

...Continued from December 14:
    But my mom did not end up moving the following day from Assisted Living to Memory Care. 
   As it turned out, in the room I chose for my mom there were some stains in the carpeting that didn't come out with a shampooing and stain treatment so the director decided to have the carpeting replaced before my mom moved in.
     The carpeting replacement would take about a week, so my mother had a week's reprieve. Or at least that was the way I saw it. My mom didn't yet know she was moving.
       But I was glad, because the postponement of my mom's move would mean she would still be in her nice room in her lovely Assisted Living neighborhood for the following week, Thanksgiving week, during which time my sister Romaine would be visiting from Portland,

​...and my daughter Claire and her hubby Miguel would be visiting from Chicago.

      Romaine arrived on Monday, November 25, Claire and Miguel came the following day, and
for the next few days we did our best to regale my mom with love and attention.

       Dennis, the Sunrise resident cat,

...who my mom believed was her cat,

...probably in no small part because Dennis likewise seemed to believe he was my mom’s cat, having taken up residence in her room shortly after she arrived,

...also shared in the attention, as well as copious amounts of cat treats.

     In our mission to make this a happy, enjoyable week for Grammy - my mom’s grandmother handle - we not only spent lots of time with her at Sunrise,

…but we took her out for lunch every day.

     Bob Evans on Tuesday,

    Olive Garden on Wednesday,

    O'Charley's on Friday.

     We even took her out for lunch on Thanksgiving day, again to Bob Evans, the only restaurant we could find open that day and where, much to our dismay, the only menu choices were Thanksgiving dinner or a couple of breakfast items. But it was an outing, anyway.

     That evening, while my sister spent her second turkey dinner of the day at Sunrise with my mom, the rest of us had Thanksgiving dinner – for some of us also the second turkey dinner of the day – at our house.

     By Saturday morning all the out-of-town company had returned home, and with all the visitors gone and the flurry of activity over, I wondered if by Saturday afternoon my mom would be feeling suddenly let-down or lonely.
     I went to visit her on Saturday afternoon and found her contentedly watching the Ohio State football game with some of her friends.

      After the football game my mom went off to participate in a game of Ohio State Buckeyes Bingo and I went home, grasping at a strand of hope that maybe the Sunrise staff would surmise that the extra week of outings and family interactions had had a therapeutic effect on my mother’s cognitive process and that perhaps they’d let her try staying a bit longer in her Assisted Living neighborhood.
     But no. The staff informed me that, though my mother may have seemed well enough with her family, she still frequently wandered around the building in confusion during the day and left her room to wander at night, too. Her week-long reprieve had been only that, a reprieve. She was still scheduled to move on Monday into the locked Memory Care Unit.