There's No Place Like (Nursing) Home

By Paul Tedesco

I have an Nh.D.  It's similar to a Ph.D., except with an N.  This one means Doctorate in Nursing Homes.  I got it at the University of Experience.  One day my mother moved into a nursing home.  On another she died there.  What happened in between changed my life.

There's No Place Like (Nursing) Home – Stories of Dementia, Dying, and Peeing on the Christmas Tree is a book for my friends, almost all of whom I haven't met.  There are 80 million of them across the country.  They're called Baby Boomers.  They, like me, are getting older.  So are their parents.  Many, my friends and their parents, are or will end up in nursing homes.  Most who do will die there.  Whether my friends learn to smile in between can change their lives too.

The book is a short folksy memoir, a compendium of stories, real ones, filled with heartbreak and agony, as well as laughter and mirth.   Shudder as judge and jury shout out their daily verdict – guilty as charged – for daring to take mom from her home of fifty-plus years.  Listen as she painstakingly tells us, day in and day out and in no uncertain terms, that she wants to go back.  Sit in the mortuary as – still in shock over the 'new normal' – we begin planning her funeral, long before she dies.  Hold your nose for stories about diapers, hers, and sons learning to parent their parents.  Hold your ears as a gentle and loving mom curses in words that would shame a sailor and which, B.D. – Before Dementia – she would have been embarrassed to hear, much less say.  There are stories about her 'friends,' from a roommate asking if we have seen her son, and asking again tomorrow, the day after, and the day after that, to a middle-aged man whose wife has likely been sentenced to decades – that's right, decades – in her new home. 

The stories are about what I saw, learned, and felt, and how I learned to smile again, then and now.   An old man mistaking a Christmas Tree for a toilet will do that.  Three-part dementia-inspired operas will do it as well.  So will listening to your saintly mom call a white nurse a "honky."  I cried, long and often, but in learning to look in the right places, I found laughter amidst my tears.  In the midst of the tempest, I also found serenity for a troubled soul.  So can my friends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Tedesco
• Release date: Aug 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393696568

Paul Tedesco

I am a former pastor and administrator at a human services organization, holding a Master of Divinity degree. I have been a weekly columnist for The Catholic Spirit, a contributor to The National Catholic Reporter, and an invited headline guest on ABC 20/20 and the Canadian Broadcast Corporation radio network.  Reading has been my passion since before I can remember. My brother carried a bat and ball. I carried a book. I still do. Lots of them. Some of them now have my name attached as the author. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did writing. I From an early age, I loved the act of creating - characters, scenes, stories - something that didn't exist before and now, at the point of my pen, did. Later it was a journal. After that a column in a newspaper, articles in others, and radio and TV. Now it's books. Fiction, mostly. I love a good story. I hope you will too. It's all about 'imagination,' isn't it? Yours and mine. When a writer and reader 'imagine' together, the world gets exponentially bigger - and a lot more fun to boot! I try to create stories that take me 'somewhere else.' I try to write something I would enjoy reading. Most especially, I try to write what I hope you will enjoy reading. If you don't, I still enjoyed doing the writing. If you do, it's the Fourth of July every day! My books are under two names, P.E. Tedesco for fiction, and Paul Tedesco for non-fiction. Papal Audience - A Thriller spins a fast-moving tale of evil infiltrating the Vatican at the highest level, with the life of both the Pope and the President of the United States hanging in the balance. There's No Place Like (Nursing) Home - Stories of Dementia, Dying and Peeing on the Christmas Tree is a brief memoir of real events - heart-rending and funny alike - surrounding my mother's two-plus years in a nursing home, what dementia did to a once-beautiful mind and personality, and how we coped. I wrote it in hopes of helping others currently - or in the future - traversing the same troubled seas. If you like suspense, you'll like The Xystus Trophy...coming sometime in 2018!

Book preview

There’s No Place Like (Nursing) Home –

Stories of Dementia, Dying, and Peeing on the Christmas Tree

by

Paul Tedesco

Text copyright © 2017 Paul Tedesco

All Rights Reserved

Also by this author:

Millennial Catholicism:  What Needs Fixed First

by Paul Tedesco

Millennial Catholicism:  What Needs Fixed First is an iconoclastic admonition for the nation’s religious monolith to right its ship while it still can.  Sixty-two million souls hang in the balance.  An estimated sixteen million others have already given up.  Ten essential threats confronting Catholicism are presented, with solutions an embattled hierarchy will not want to hear.

Papal Audience – A Thriller

by P.E. Tedesco

A beloved Pope has been kidnapped. His ransom: the President of the United States. The world watches as the crucified Vicar of Christ, is paraded across the world stage by Islamist captors via Internet streaming video, setting in motion a series of earth-shattering events designed to force the President to make the ultimate decision – her life for that of the Pope’s.

The Iscariot File

by P.E. Tedesco

What if?  What if a secret of epic proportions has been sequestered in the labyrinthine bowels of the Vatican for two millennia? What if a feisty American woman is about to find out?  What if a secret no less epic for her is about to be spilled by rogue prelates who will stop at nothing to stop her?  What if failure will incite a cataclysm destined to shake the foundations of all they hold sacred?  Did history’s most notorious rogue, Judas Iscariot himself, share the bloodline of Jesus of Nazareth?  What if?

Princess of the Apostles

by P.E. Tedesco

A secret of epic proportions lies hidden deep in the bowels of the Vatican, where it has lain for two millennia – the existence of a thirteenth female apostle.  The startling revelation will rock the foundations of the ‘one true Church’ as intrigue and murder winds from the Vatican to ancient ruins in Turkey to a bloodletting finale on the high altar of the Basilica of Saint Peter, Prince of the Apostles.

http://www.paultedescoauthor.com

Dedication

The Catholic Church has a protocol, steeped in tradition,

for officially recognizing saints.  It’s called canonization. 

You need miracles, investigative panels, theologians – you get the picture. 

There is another protocol, equally steeped in tradition in the pews –

all you need is a life spent living the Gospel.  My parents did that. 

Saint Laura of Carroll Street, and Saint Herb of South Wheeling.

Enjoy their story.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Day the Earth Stood Still

Shock Waves

First-Born Son

Catafalques

Guilty As Charged

The New Normal

It Depends

Too Much Information

All in the Family

Dementia and Honkies

Strangers in the Night

Three-Ring Circus

Groundhog Day

Cast and Crew

Tabernacles

Peeing on the Christmas Tree

Friends

Hail Mary

Progeny

Empty Beds

Tear Ducts

Letting Go

There’s No Place Like Home

What About Bob?

No More Rain

Postscript

Introduction

The year 1983 produced one of Hollywood’s most-hyped and bloodcurdling films, a made-for-TV movie entitled The Day After.  Jason Robards starred.  A young John Lithgow co-starred.  Produced during the throes of the Cold War, it jolted unsuspecting living-room viewers with the ghastly and grim realities of the consequences of a nuclear war, here, in the United States.  Mushroom clouds over American cities.  Blindness, radiation sores, people dying faster than they could be buried.  Life as they knew it had changed forever in an instant, profoundly. 

In a scene subsequent to the leveling of Kansas City in one of the saga’s nuclear blasts, the Lithgow character, a university professor in nearby Lawrence, Kansas, site of an accompanying blast, finds a ham radio.  In intermittent scenes throughout the remainder of the story, including the ghostly sound of his voice over a black screen at the movie’s end, he repeatedly and feverishly twists the dials and utters the same cryptic words. 

Is anybody out there, anybody at all? 

I was there.  Okay, not Lawrence or Kansas City.  No mushroom cloud, thank God.  I was jolted by a shock wave, however, a radioactive one that leveled me no less than the denizens of cities laid waste in the movie.  Mine happened the day I put my mom in a nursing home.

We had a happy family growing up.  Mom and Dad were the proverbial ‘match made in heaven,’ joined at the hip if ever a husband and wife were.  I was the eldest son, my brother fourteen months younger.  Family dinners every night, church on Sunday and nightly prayers before bedtime.  Popcorn with TV, summer trips to the beach, Sunday drives to pick paw-paws, with a stop for ice cream on the way home.  We had our occasional ups and downs.  What family doesn’t?  But we were a family, a happy, contented, and close one.  A lucky one, too. 

Somehow, the more serious tragedies that seemed to mark other families from time to time somehow escaped us.  We were immune, or at least it felt like it.  My brother was ill as a youngster and spent the better part of a year in bed at home, recovering, home-schooled by our mother.  He did, however, recover, fully.  Mom was in the hospital from time to time, never the world’s healthiest woman, but far from the sickest too.  Like my brother, she survived.  Dad was the epitome of health.  So was I.  Immune, remember?

Adulthood brought my brother and me the usual travails, life changes and challenges waiting to be hurdled.  But hurdle them we did, maybe not cleanly in every case, but eventually, and fully.  When we did, Mom and Dad were there to goad us over, and cheer us when we landed.  We did the same for them.  In-laws and grandchildren enriched an already prosperous—in everything that mattered most—hearth and home.  Immunity is a wonderful thing.

We read about other families’ trials and tribulations, saw them on TV, and watched them on the news.  Some of them were our neighbors.  Some were aunts, uncles, cousins.  Some suffered tragically and suddenly, others for years on end.  We suffered with them, held their hands, and dried their tears.  Only one thing made them different.  The tragedies, the chronic illnesses, the family ruptures were theirs, not ours.  We were inoculated.  Immune.

Immunity is not only a wonderful thing; it’s a dangerous thing too.  It breeds contentment, whether you want it or not.  Once immune, always immune.  You learn to live with it, because it’s a comfortable place to be.  You come to expect it.  Not sure why, but it’s their lots, not ours.  It’s just the way it is, the way it’s always been.  Most importantly, the way it always will be, the way I wanted it to stay.  Immune.

I’m a Baby Boomer.  Maybe you are too.  It’s a big club.  Estimates exceed the seventy-six million mark now.  That’s seventy-six million of us, and many of our parents, all now coming of age.  Old age.  Seniors.  The Golden Years.  Coming of age for alternative places to live.  For many of them/us, like my mother, that has already eventually meant a nursing home.  For lots more of them/us, it soon will.  You’re not exempt.  Don’t believe it.  I did—hook, line, and sinker.  I was wrong.  The inoculation didn’t take.  The immunity was gone, permanently.

What follows does not purport to give you all the answers.  It won’t help you pick a nursing home when your time comes, or how to pay for it.  It won’t tell you where to find the resources you’ll need.  Others have already done that.  It is not a tome, a scholarly study.  Those have their place.  This isn’t it.  What it is, however, is a compendium of stories—real ones—designed to help you.  It is my hope it will help you in your spiritual struggles by sharing my own, struggles the stories engendered.  It is my hope it will help you surmount the pain and guilt that are a tsunami waiting to pummel the shore, inevitable and unsparing.  It is my hope, perhaps more than anything else, that it will help you smile—and keep smiling—while you’re hurting in ways you never hurt before, ways that tear at the very fiber of your soul.  It’s a story about survival—hers, mine, ours.  Maybe yours.

We were immune, remember?  This could never happen to her, to us, to me.  Somehow, however, when we were looking the other way, it did. 

I wasn’t in Lawrence or Kansas City when the mother of all nightmares lit up the sky.  I get it, though.  I had a nightmare of my own.

Is anybody out there, anybody at all?

The Day the Earth Stood Still

As you might have guessed by now, I like movies.  This is not a movie review, however.  This story wasn’t nearly as much fun.

Mom had been failing for awhile.  My brother and I had been talking about it for awhile.  Just talking.  Mom and Dad hadn’t said a word.  No surprise there.  They never did.  If they were suffering, they suffered in silence and put on a good front, an Oscar-worthy front.  I lived an hour away, my brother right in town, his and his family’s home a ten minute drive from theirs.  I was there a lot, one or two Sundays a month for dinner, either at their dining room table at our old homestead or with them as guests at their favorite local Italian restaurant for capellini and sausage.  The dinners at home stopped, suddenly, with the word that mom just wasn’t up to it anymore.  Mom lived