I am an Alzheimer’s daughter who lost her mom to COVID. It was the worst experience of my life.
My mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2014 and she lived near me. In October 0f 2018 my family and I made the decision to move her into a memory care because her needs were more than her current assisted living could handle.
And just over a year later, everything changed.
It all happened so quickly and my mom’s memory care was locked down and I was on the outside. One thing I noticed right away was that my mom’s cognitive abilities, her talking her walking, everything, started to decline, but I also realized pretty quickly that all my caregiving responsibilities were gone. I could only sit outside the window and talk to her through a screen with my mask on or on a speakerphone.
I thought that in a few months people in government, people in positions of power, would have to see that keeping family members apart, especially keeping the elderly from their family, was wrong. If I could see it was making my mom worse, then other’s could see it too and I believed they would have to do something. Locking people away in nursing homes was a quick solution to the virus, but I could see right away that it wasn’t a long term solution and I truly I believed that something would change.
But it didn’t.
I had written to my governor, I had complained to my local DHS office and I was on the phone almost every day with the memory care home that my mom lived in. I asked everyone for change.
But nothing happened.
My next hope was that my mom and my family could just wait out COVID until the day when everything would be better and they would open the doors and let me into my mom’s memory home and I would run around the corner and be able to hug her and kiss her and tell her face to face that I loved her.
It was pretty much the only hope that kept me going.
And then the worst possible thing happened. My mom got COVID in an outbreak in her facility and she got sick and she died alone in the middle of the night in a COVID nursing home.
After the shock wore off I was angry and I reached out to lawyers and I wanted to sue someone, anyone, for what happened to my mom and after months of struggling through that and learning that in Oregon, where I live, there were laws rushed through to protect nursing homes from liability in the COVID pandemic. I had to give that up, too.
I wanted justice for my mom.
But I also felt alone. I had all this anger and frustration, but I didn’t know what to do with it and then this idea formed in my mind that if I couldn’t get justice for my mom, maybe I could focus that energy into helping myself and others.
This podcast idea came into being.