Elderly Depression Can Be the Beginning of Sad Times to Come

When my mother had moved out of her home due to falling and breaking her arm, to stay with my sister for a couple of months, we saw that although my sister's house was very hectic with other family members coming and going with their personal issues, it was the activity of people being around that made my mother feel alive and we could see that it made her feel better to be around people. After my father died, my mother lived on her own for about 10 years or so. It was fine for many of those years as she was an active person, had many friends and was always busy. The family visited her a lot as well. It was my blessing to come there with my daughters after my divorce as I lived about an hour away from them and when I came to visit them in the middle of the work week, we would all go there and my mother made dinner for us, played games with my younger daughter as I went over homework with the older one. So there was a lot going on and she was fine living on here own.

As a few more years went on, and she fell and broke her arm and had to stay with my sister, we started to become concerned about her living on her own and that the house was getting old and was showing signs of needing a good deal of repair. After staying at my sister's house for a couple of months, she thought she wanted to go back home as she was clashing with her daughter over little things and was not feeling at home there. She discovered, after she went back home that it felt so lonely now that she had lived around so many people and activity. She started seeing that the house needed a lot of attention. So, somehow, she made up her mind that it was time to sell the house, but she didn't want to live with my sister at the time. We found a small apartment in her community next to the part so she could talk walks and get outside, but it wasn't an elderly community, so she really started feeling alone and wanted everyone to visit her every day. She found that she didn't like living all alone like that and we saw great signs of depression and for the first time, signs of memory loss. It was the beginning of things to come.

A new retirement complex was being built in a nice area of town. It was new, secure entry and would have many other senior citizens living there as well. There was a waiting list to live there as this was a government supported retirement residence, so the rent was adjusted per your income. My mother had a small retirement from the hospital she worked for over 40 years and social security, so she would have a small monthly rent. We were able to get her into the apartment and it was a wonderfully decorated place with a nice dining room area but each apartment also had it's own kitchen, so you could prepare your own food or pay for having dinner there. There were places throughout to gather, to exercise and a library and laundry. She live there for a good length of time, but as her progression to the early stages of Alzheimer's Disease continued, she became more reclusive and interacted much less with others, even though she had a good many friendships at the residence. She became more negative and chastised family members each time they came to visit for not coming enough, which made it more difficult to come soon again for many family members. She was gradually shutting out the world through her negativity. Even though we saw our mother progress to more depression over a few years, we still knew she was in the best place she could be and was safe. She lived there until her Alzheimer's began to make her forget how to keep her balance and she fell and broke her hip. The surgery went well and she healed comparatively quickly, but as many find out, the anesthesia during surgery launched the Alzheimer's into it's full first stage event. This seems to occur a lot with the elderly. We held the apartment for a few months in hopes that she would return, but she never did. It was sad to see that phase go from living in a really nice residence to a life of nursing homes. She now lives in a government supported public nursing facility and is in later stages of Alzheimer's Disease. This all happened only over the last 2 - 3 years.

Watch for signs of depression in your elder family member as it can be the beginning of a downside slide to what will become a relatively fast progression to a sad ending. I think about my father's death often as I think of my mother's sad progression with Alzheimer's Disease. He was only 74, and just dropped one day and died of a sudden and mass heart attack which was devastating to all of the family. Obviously, we would all have preferred for him to live longer and have the years of wonderful family times that my mother did, but when we think about where my mother's path led to, we know it was a better way to leave this world for him. He did not have to go through the events of leaving his home that he lived in from his early life of marriage with my mother and raising a family. He didn't have to go through the years of depression and slow progression of illnesses.

We all should be blessed with a long healthy life with loved ones around us, and go to sleep one night and pass on that way, if we lucky enough.