Why Assisted Living: A Grandson's View

A few years ago, Alzheimer’s took over my grandmother. The woman who I once knew, who I once admired and adored, was no longer inside, and it broke both my heart and the one belonging to my entire family. 

When it first came upon her, I, just as she, didn’t know how to act. Every time we’d visit her apartment, she’d act in strange ways, as if her whole psyche reverted back to what it was like when she was a small child. There was even this one time when I accompanied her and my immediate family to a local diner. After getting settled in our booth, my grandmother started playing with the bottled condiments on the table, began cracking the oddest and most inappropriate of jokes, and continuously didn’t relent with hysterical bursts of laughter. Eventually, days became weeks, and started passing all of us as months, and we knew something had to be done. Nothing much remained, and a member of our family was in trouble, so we acted promptly. My parents soon didn’t trust her to handle certain things on her own, such as driving a car. And by and by, they moved her into a local assisted living facility, putting the strong independent woman I once knew as my grandmother in the hands of unknown nurses and caretakers. At first it felt saddening, but I quickly realized that it was what was needed, what was best for her, which is all any of us really wanted. And that’s because the woman we all used to know, whether we wanted to openly admit it or not, was mostly gone, and life's finitude was surely about to set in for good for her. 

I understood that my grandmother was in the proper hands, but she wasn’t in my family’s hands, and that’s what bothered me most about shipping her off to assisted living. I felt that we had abandoned her, leaving her to fend for herself in this cruel world that doesn’t care about age or tragic circumstances. What helped me to navigate through those feelings, however, was the assurance I supplied myself. Deep down, I knew that she was in a state-certified facility, a real good, safe, and secure one, and that it wasn’t either shady or questionable in the slightest. 

There were times in which my family and I would pay her visits, making sure she was doing okay and living somewhat swell. Two things came out of these infrequent visits. The first consisted of multitudes of sadness, which stemmed from my grandmother’s simply forgetting my name and the names of my siblings and parents. It was especially hard to see her have trouble coming up with properly saying my dad’s name, considering that he was her only son. 

On the brighter side of the moon, the side that revealed how beneficial it was for my grandmother to be living where she was, during these visits, I noticed the patience of everyone working within the assisted living community that had become her new home. Calm nurses entered her room from time to time, redoing her bedsheets and restocking her supply of food. The realization that she was protected and taken care of hit me as meteors once impacted the Earth, and they helped me to understand that assisted living isn’t the worst possible thing in the whole world. 

While a disease is what took my grandmother away from me and my family, the last years of her life were not in vain. She spent quality time with those around her, in the assisted living facility that we, I soon understood, hadn’t carelessly thrown her into. I thought we had put her there without a second thought, but with time and the development of my maturity, I’ve since realized that what was done was definitely what was best. All it took was a bit of trust, and a bit of faith in the model as a whole.

— Zach Blair