Monday 15^th October

I have been thinking about nursing homes recently – no I don’t need to move into one just yet… But if I did, there are a few very luxurious ones around, thank you very much!

For a while, before she moved into a very pleasant nearby nursing home, Pete’s mum had a live-in carer, Marion, who had once been the matron of a nursing home in NSW.  She was very efficient and kind, but was always known to Pete’s mum, who REALLY didn’t want a stranger in her house, as the women who live upstairs.

Marion told us a few stories about her days as a matron.  My favourite one involved two brothers, in their early 80s.  These oldcodgers came in to talk to her one day about respite care.  They tottered in, a bit shaky, and described to her what they were after – a few weeks, around Christmas.  Marion wasn’t sure that the nursing home would be able to take them both in, and when she said this, they burst out laughing and said, “No, no, the respite care is for Mum! We want to go on holiday to Queensland and we can’t take her with us!”

Apparently they had always lived with their mum, had never left home.  She still did all the cooking, cleaning, washing for her boys, but they didn’t think she was up to a trip away from home.  Also I think she possibly needed a rest…

Another saintly woman I knew, Rita, was married to a very bossy, miserable man for about seventy years.  He didn’t like to spend money, and she had threadbare teatowels, aluminium pots and pans, ancient underwear, although her offspring tried to improve her lot in life.  He would testily throw out all of the newfangled stuff which came into the house, and kept his poor wife under very firm control.  He died when she was in her early nineties and the family decided that Rita should really go into a nursing home.  They worried that she would find it hard to adapt to a new environment after so many years in her own (cold and shabby…) house.  No such thing!  She absolutely thrived in her new sunny, warm room, with soft sheets, fluffy towels, yummy meals appearing at regular intervals, new friends lying back in recliner chairs in a warm room with big flatscreen TVs to watch!  Bliss!