Support group offers valued lessons on coping

Joyce Lathrom’s husband, Clovis, died six years ago. He had Alzheimer’s disease.

“I kept him at home for two years, starting in 1994,” Lathrom said. “I’d always said I wouldn’t let him go to a nursing home, but it got to the point where there really wasn’t a choice. I had to – that first month he was in the nursing home was the worst month in my life. Worse than when he died.”

Lathrom, 74, rarely misses the twice-a-month meetings of the Alzheimer’s Caregiver Support Group at the Douglas County Senior Center, 745 Vt.

“This group saved my life,” she said. “They took me in. They taught me that you have to take care of yourself first because if you don’t, who’s going to be there for your loved one?”

Lathrom attends the meetings, she said, to help others who are coping with family members stricken with Alzheimer’s.

“This is a terrible disease,” she said. “Everybody needs help dealing with it.”

Joyce Lathrom, Lawrence, holds a picture of her late husband, Clovis. While caring for her husband in the last years of his life, Joyce Lathrom took advantage of a local support group, which she still attends.

At last week’s meeting, four of the 11 attendees were widows or widowers.

“They gave me encouragement and insight on many of the things so many of them had already gone through,” said Vernon Whitmore, 80. “The camaraderie was helpful, too.”

Whitmore’s wife, Helen, died Dec. 3. She’d had Alzheimer’s for two years. She was 78.

“The main thing I had to learn was that she was in a different world and that I couldn’t bring her back to the world we’d shared for so long,” he said. “All I could do was try to enter the world she was in.”

The Whitmores had been married 59 years.

“I remember the time she didn’t know who I was. I said, ‘I’m your husband,’ and she said, ‘No, you’re not. I don’t have a husband,” Whitmore said. “After that, I told friends I was her taxi driver – that’s what I mean, I couldn’t keep her in my world so I entered hers.”

Topics discussed during the group’s meetings include:

¢ Frustration over there not being a gerontologist in town.

¢ Difficulty in finding good caregivers.

¢ Coping with the embarrassment of being in public with someone with Alzheimer’s.

¢ Not knowing whom to call during in-home emergencies.

¢ The benefits of the Douglas County Senior Center’s day-care program.

The group meets from 2:15 p.m. to 3:45 p.m. on the first and third Mondays of each month at the Douglas County Senior Services Center, 745 Vt.

Respite available

A Lawrence home health care agency has received a state grant aimed at providing relief for caregivers. Families may be eligible for two hours of respite care a week or one day a month.
For information, call Kelly at Trinity In-Home Care, 842-3159.

“Because the first and third Mondays in January were both on holidays, we met (Jan. 9),” said Janet Ikenberry, community service manager with Douglas County Senior Services.

“Our next meeting will be Feb. 6,” she said.

The meetings are free and open to all caregivers.

Brandon Woods Retirement Community, 1501 Inverness Drive, is planning an April public forum on Alzheimer’s. A date is pending.