Adult Daycare

Below:

• Adult Day Services

• Finding the right facility

• What else to look for

Anybody who met Mable Weaver several years ago would have never guessed she was in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. As the Berkeley, California, resident entered her 80s, she was alert and active, and she even held a job as a housekeeper. At that time, her next-door neighbor and daughter, LaFrancine Weaver Tate, was the only person who suspected a problem. And as Tate soon discovered, it was a problem that would change her life as surely as her mother's.



Tate started worrying when she noticed her mother was losing weight. The older woman was also having trouble finding the right words, and her memory was clearly failing. The concern turned to panic when Tate noticed a badly burnt cabinet in her mother's kitchen, obviously the result of a cooking accident. Weaver couldn't explain what happened, but Tate knew all she needed to know: Her mother was no longer safe on her own.
But what could Tate do? She couldn't afford to quit her job as a hospital administrator; none of her relatives lived close enough to lend a hand, and she definitely didn't want to put her mother in a nursing home. "After a certain point, I was frantic," she says. "I couldn't manage. It was like I was frozen."