A Thank You Party for Life Care Center

The photo at left comes from a thank-you party we recently had over at Life Care Center. It was just one of the ways we have tried to express our appreciation to the staff of that facility who did such a wonderful job of taking care of my Mom in the last two years of her life. We brought the cake (made and beautifully decorated by Baker's) at just the right time in the afternoon to catch the shift change. Our initial plan was to just bring the cake, present a few gifts to the director and then split. But we ended up hanging around and talking with various members of the staff for about an hour and a half.

And yes, we made sure the cake was big enough so that there was plenty left over to supply the night shift too.

Alongside the cake, we set up some pictures of Mom and that turned out to be a nice blessing for the staff because so many of them truly treasured her. We also had off some copies of the funeral reading which staff members had asked for. And then there were also the gifts we donated to the facility as a memorial to my Mom. We had been deliberating over an appropriate memorial gift for quite awhile and had checked out several items. But we ended up giving the administrators a Visa gift card to get whatever they wanted for the facility. We also filled a box with 8-10 jigsaw puzzles (which Mom loved to put together), decks of cards and boxes of dominoes and gave that to LCC for the residents' use.

The nurses and aides, administrators and activities staff, rehab therapists and cooks, custodians and maintenance workers -- everybody stopped by to grab a piece of cake, give us hugs, and tell a story or two about Mom before going on back to work. It was a really sweet time.

Thank yous are always a great thing to pass around. But, in the case of the Life Care Center folks, they were genuinely deserved.