The Mustache

This short story follows a teenager straddling the precarious line between adolescence and adulthood, Mike, as he visits his grandmother in an assisted living facility. He discovers that she thinks he is her late husband when she tries desperately to get him to forgive her for a past wrong, while Mike is bewildered at such a raw view of someone he previously only thought of as a distant relation, not her own person. This would be useful for a class discussion on dementia and its effects on family members, as well as the residential care industry itself. It might be a particularly important resource for training healthcare workers to work with the elderly in these kinds of facilities to better understand nuanced experiences of both those who live there and those who visit. Courses on aging more generally could also easily incorporate this as a prompt for discussion or writing reflections.

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