Stone Soup
“I promised my mother I would never put her in a nursing home no matter what,” Mary expressed with tears in her eyes. We were filling out admission paper work at the facility that I was working at, and she couldn’t get through a page without tearing up.
It’s a common scene played out many times each week in nursing homes across the country. A family member has to put there loved one in a nursing home and has trouble processing all of the emotions that come with it. It’s hard, there’s no doubt about it. In the minds of most Americans nursing homes are sad dark lonely places. No one wants to end their days in half a room in a smelly old building.
The truth is nursing homes of twenty years ago are not the nursing homes of today. Many nursing home chains are adopting “culture change” to embrace the person centered care model. I spend time each week in nursing homes from New Hampshire to Alabama to Idaho. In these centers, a person can hear laughter, singing, and playing. People are living their golden years being productive in many different ways.
Last week I saw a group of residents making vegetable soup. The women and men were laughing and joking about how their vegetable soup was their own version of stone soup. It got me to thinking about that story. Have you ever read “Stone Soup?” Well it’s a fable about cooperation when a couple of con men enter a village with nothing to eat. No one wants to share anything with them. The villagers only want to complain about the plights of their lives. They convince the village that the stone they have will make the greatest soup of all time. A big pot is brought into the village square and then as time passes, the con men begin suggesting how much better the soup would be if, say, they had a carrot. Then a little while later they suggested a head of cabbage and so on and so forth. Needless to say when the soup was finished everyone had provided something to the soup to make it the “best soup ever!”
Life in nursing homes can be the “best soup ever.” When loved ones come to visit they bring a little of themselves into the home. I’ve seen families who would sit with residents in the dining room and begin a sing-a long, and I have also seen families who would volunteer to visit just to feed their loved one. Families would even help plant the garden in the spring, help harvest in the fall, and enjoy the bounty with the residents in the center.
Look around at the centers in your area. You might be surprised at how much living is really going on in those nursing homes. How can you add to the “Stone Soup” in your area?
