Over 90

Tomorrow my spouse travels to her mother's city to place her in a care facility and I am wondering about the feelings mother must have about being told where she is going to live. How might I react to that? Admittedly I am not 92 years old and more than a little confused but mother is taking this news with more complaisance than I could have ever imagined. She was told yesterday that she is leaving her apartment where she has lived for decades and where she is surrounded by her own (admittedly worn out) things, her familiar kitchen, bathroom, wall decorations and artificial fireplace. She does not see the ripples in the worn carpet or the drabness of the walls or the age of the furniture or the turntable record player that has not operated for a score of years and for which there are no records anyhow. This is just her familiar place, her home. But now, on 48 hours notice, she is being moved to a "care facility" where she will share a room and a bathroom with another older woman and where she will have few if any of her own things. AND she knows that once she moves, her family will go through her things item by item and dispose of nearly all of the detritus of her life. How does that feel?

Does one surrender to age at some point, surrender to the fact that one's own life is no longer under her control or is there a certain benefit of a dementia that allows one to simply ignore much of such details?

I am 62 and know that I and my cohort are too much concerned with the minutiae of daily life, with current events, our finances, our children's needs and much that does not really matter as much as it seems at the moment. Is there a certain sort of benevolence that allows some of us to simply set aside these concerns, live in the moment and let others care for us as they did when we were tiny children?

What do you learn from watching these events unfold for others? We had expected that such a move would be with much kicking and screaming and yet it does not appear likely.