The willed ignorance about sexuality of those who, somehow or other, managed to beget us, continues all the way to the nursing home, it turns out—sometimes with heart-rending consequences.
The sexual life of our elders is something we younger folks shudder to imagine – whether it’s an aversion to thinking about what goes on behind a parent’s closed bedroom door, or horror at the notion of Viagra in the medicine cabinet.
Perhaps, you are a married couple, who had moved into a nursing home room with adjacent hospital beds. Your spouse had a condition that required elevating a leg, and the beds had been placed, so that the leg was on the same side as yours, which made it hard for you to hold hands. Do not see this as a problem and try to live with it.
While you are not thinking about it, your elders apparently are.
The biggest obstacle is simply that staff, like the rest of us, weren’t prepared to acknowledge sexuality among the elderly.
The most common reason offered for restrictions on sex in nursing homes is the conundrum of Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Although you may have legal decision-making power in some cases—are arguably the last ones who ought to be making decisions when it comes to the sex lives of your parents.
If dementia entered the picture, and a sticky situation arises, leave the decision-making to, say, a duly deputized second cousin. But that may not happen, if you can’t even bring yourself to broach the subject in the first place.
Certainly, when the time comes for your parents to move into a nursing home or assisted living community, the list of things to talk about—money, location, what to do about the house—is long enough as it is. If you are going to treat your parents the way you wanted to be treated as, say, sexually nascent adolescents—as full human beings with needs and desires, capable of making choices and forming deep connections—it may be time to think about having “The Talk.”
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