FAMILY | HOME
When Is the Right Time to Send Mom to a Nursing Home?
It’s harder than I thought to seriously talk about leaving the only home my mother has known for the past forty years.
Even though my mother has never been the so-called picture of health, she never had any serious health problems aside from one brief hospitalization a few years prior due to gastrointestinal issues. The cause of which has still not been determined.
My mom turned 70 years old a few months before I planned to move to Europe indefinitely. Her birthday was a week before the global pandemic started, which pushed the date of my departure back a couple of months.
The protective measures that were in place while traveling during the age of Covid, combined with the mountain of bureaucratic steps I had to climb to legally live and work in another country, made it too difficult for me to visit the United States for a long time.
It had only been a little more than two years since I had seen my mom when I arrived in Philadelphia on December 1, 2022, but it felt like a lifetime had passed between us.
She had lost a lot of weight, and she was having problems with her teeth to the point where her dentist said that she would…
