By Ashlyn Myers TheStatehouseFile.com July 25, 2025
Melissa Taylor, the director of nursing for Morning Pointe Senior Living in Franklin, Indiana, walks past halls of smiling faces every day as she makes her way to her office.
The doors along her walk are painted in bright colors to mimic the outside world. A mural of Franklin College serves as the backdrop of the main dining room. Another wall is painted like an ice cream stand. On another, a field is filled with blooming flowers and a luscious green pasture.
The sounds of rolling wheelchair wheels and the brushes of tennis-ball-braced walkers on carpet blend in with the songs of Elvis Presley. The scent of nail polish welcomes guests into the memory care unit. Nurses and their aids giggle as they brush polish onto fingers decorated with antique jewelry passed down from generations before them.
The certified nursing assistants (CNAs) work to paint designs that represent each resident’s personality. A former teacher gets apples and “A+” on her fingers, while a former clown gets a circus design.
The residents often don’t remember the names of the employees, but even still, they love them.
Taylor emancipated herself at 17 years old, and didn’t have the close relationship with her grandparents that she desired.
Decades later, she’s greeted with smiles from 37 grandparents every morning.
Two residents who proudly call themselves best friends laugh as Melissa Taylor, Morning Pointe of Franklin director of nursing, dances. (Photo/Ashlyn Myers of TheStatehouseFile.com)
“It’s amazing. I probably do have a lot of abandonment issues from my childhood, so to have people every day that just love you for you—it’s good,” Taylor said before wiping a tear.
“I love it so much, I can’t even tell you. I love old people, I have my entire life. We can learn so much from them.”
With a laundry list of responsibilities, Taylor can’t be everywhere at once. In addition to overseeing the memory care unit, Lantern, she’s also in charge of the regular assisted living unit.
This means she needs staff she can trust to love the residents just as much as she does.
“They give up their whole life to be in a place that’s not their home with just a few things, so to have people love them just like family—oh gosh, it’s so nice,” she said.
“Families are entrusting us, and it’s my responsibility to make sure I hire the right people,” Taylor said. “If you’re not the right fit, you can’t stay, because they [the residents] deserve better, and they’ve earned it.”
Count to three. In just that short time span, a doctor diagnoses someone in the world with dementia—but their story doesn’t stop there.
After diagnosis, dementia patients need resources, help and support from loved ones and healthcare workers. While patients deal with dementia head on, the disease takes a toll on those helping the patients, too.
Memory loss disorders, often thrown beneath the umbrella term of dementia, are a worldwide problem affecting millions of adults. While there are over 100 different types of dementia, vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s are responsible for up to 90% of cases of dementia.
The large case numbers are staggering, but there are real, local people living behind the statistics.
Sarah Lee, the Lantern program director, said long-term care facilities are different because, just as the same suggests, patients are being cared for by the same nurses and CNAs until their last days—and it’s not easy work.
“It’s back-breaking work,” Lee said. “It’s self-rewarding, but it’s a thankless job. You really have to have a heart for it. If you’re in it for the money, you’re in it for all the wrong reasons.”
Meeting at their level
Lee said to treat memory care patients, you need patience, and you need understanding.
“Some people view dementia as a memory issue, but it’s way more than that. It affects their eyes, the way they see, it affects their hearing, it affects their fine motor skills, it affects everything about their daily living,” Lee said. “Once you learn all that, you learn different approaches with them.”
Using non-verbal communication can be essential to working with dementia patients. There are different stages of dementia, from early stages, where patients are still relatively able to communicate their needs, to late stages, where patients often become non-verbal. Non-verbal communication can reach patients of all levels of severity.
Morning Pointe staff approach their patients gently with soft tones. Lee said it’s important to not startle dementia patients, as they often process their emotions differently than those without memory issues.
They also have shaped their Lantern program to meet the needs of their residents.
To address their eyesight, all of Lantern’s cutlery and other kitchen materials are red. The patients drink water from red cups, and eat their applesauce with red spoons.
“If you were to put a white plate, with a chicken breast and mashed potatoes, it’s all going to blend together. With their eyesight, they’re not going to be able to see it,” Lee said. “There’s just so many different things you can do to help them see better, navigate better.”
Small steps
Success in a dementia unit looks far different than it does in a hospital or rehabilitation setting.
It’s the small wins that keep the workers going.
“It’s the little things. If I can make them laugh, make them smile, not just having them sit in front of a TV all day, then it’s a good day for them,” Lee said.
There’s no cure or progress with dementia. Patients don’t really get better. Instead, they get comfortable in their routines, and occasionally have a little bit of fun.
Morning Pointe recently installed a new attraction for their male memory care residents. The room, nicknamed The Garage, is decked out with a fully operational shiny red toolbox, tools and an old gas pump with the price stuck in time at 29.9¢ per gallon.
Lantern residents routinely do creative crafts to keep their hands busy. Recently, they planted an herb garden, hoping the kitchen staff would use the fresh herbs in their food.
They also listen to music that takes them back in time—from Elvis Presley to Dean Martin.
According to an article by Northwestern Now, an online news outlet through Northwestern University, music memories often stay with dementia patients long after other memories fade because the region of the brain where musical memory and processing occurs, the cerebellum, is not affected as early as other portions of the brain.
‘It’s living with it’
Lee said she hates when people say someone is dying with dementia.
There’s a certain finality associated with death, and she doesn’t want to treat dementia like a death sentence.
Sarah Lee and Melissa Taylor laugh about a funny resident occurrence at Morning Pointe of Franklin. (Photo/Ashlyn Myers of TheStatehouseFile.com)
“We’re all dying. It’s living with it. Yes, they have a brain disease, their brain is being destroyed, but they’re still living,” Lee said. “We have to learn to live in their world, instead of trying to bring them into ours.”
“I see that all the time. People being like, ‘No, Mom, it’s not Friday, it’s Tuesday.’ Wherever they are, just go along with it. Their life and your life will be much easier.”
In fact, some of Lee’s favorite memories come from when she’s stepped out of her world and walked into theirs.
“I’ve had some claim their rooms were flooded. [They’d] come running out, I’d go running down the hall thinking their toilet is flooding, and there’s nothing in their room, and I go, ‘Okay, so now I have to act out a scene here.”
If not a flood, some go in search of a pool.
“We had one that strolled up in his wheelchair with his pull-up on and his towel, and he’s like, ‘Where’s the pool?’” Taylor said, laughing with Lee.
“No two days are the same, and that’s what makes it fun,” Lee added with a smile.
Tori Taylor, a local qualified medication aide (QMA) who works at Homeview Health and Rehabilitation in Franklin, also believes that living in the realities of her patients is the best way to keep them comfortable.
Morning Pointe of Franklin CNA Kourtney Cox dances down the hall with a resident in hand. (Photo/Ashlyn Myers of TheStatehouseFile.com)
Tori said she’s had dementia patients who were worried their parents didn’t know where they were, when in all actuality, their parents had been dead for years. In those moments, Taylor said she’d rather her patients be comfortable than relive the death of their family members over and over.
“If they’re looking for mom and dad, we just say, ‘Don’t worry, Mom and Dad know where you’re at. You’re at summer camp!’” Tori said.
“You just try to redirect them in a way that isn’t harmful to them. There’s a lot of people that think lying to them is encouraging them to have hallucinations, and that’s not the case. You’re keeping them comfortable and keeping them peaceful.”
Tori has been around dementia since long before she was old enough to work. Growing up, some of Taylor’s first memories with her great grandmother are now stained from the effects of Alzheimer’s.
“Before she went into the nursing home, me and my cousin were at her house, and while she was normally very happy and very excited that we visited, she found a broken toy and started screaming,” Tori said, recalling the memory. “That was really out of character for her.”
Looking back on the memory, Tori understands that her emotional outburst wasn’t intentional, just another key symptom of Alzheimer’s.
The Alzheimer’s Association shared that aggression and agitation are often found in Alzheimer’s patients that are experiencing discomfort, pain or confusion. While these emotional spells aren’t intentional, it’s just as hard on family members and friends as it is on the patients themselves.
Watching people close to Taylor develop Alzheimer’s has given her a new perspective on how family members of her patients feel.
“It’s always hard to watch someone’s personality, because that’s the difficult part—you watch someone slowly lose who they are, and they literally go backwards in time until they die,” Tori said.
All the while, Taylor said it’s important to treat dementia patients exactly as they are: human. She made it clear that while dementia patients aren’t children, it sometimes feels like she’s wrangling a preschooler—except they’re all eighty.
“You’ve got Mrs. Smith over here banging on her door yelling, ‘Hey! This door is broken,’ while two folks are over here talking about an invisible man in the corner who looks crazy because he didn’t brush his hair this morning,” Taylor said, laughing as she shook her head.
Happy days amidst heartbreak
No one is immune to Alzheimer’s—even those who have spent years of their lives in medical school.
Erin Lee Reamer, a local veterinary technician, comes from a family full of medical professionals. They all knew the signs of Alzheimer’s far before her mother, Erica Juergens Duggan, developed the disease.
“My mother was a family physician. My father is a family physician. My brother’s an ER doc. Her father was a family physician, so even though she knew what was going to happen to her, she couldn’t have known how it was going to happen to her,” Reamer said.
Reamer’s mother was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s over 14 years ago, when Reamer was still in her twenties.
“Because of her diagnosis, she retired, and then my father retired to take care of her, and promised her that he would be her sole caregiver,” Reamer said. “So for the last, you know, basically 14 years, he has been her sole caregiver. She went on hospice last February, February of 24, but up until then, he cared for her by himself in their home.”
With her mom at home, Reamer said she had the chance to see her mother through many different Alzheimer’s stages, but one sticks out the most.
“The one constant that was very beautiful but also painful, even when she could barely talk, because she was nonverbal. Basically, for the last like five years, she couldn’t walk, she couldn’t feed herself, I mean, any of that, but she would still say thank you. So she always retained a deep sense of gratitude for what people were doing for her,” Reamer said.
Reamer said her mother was “a force of nature.”
Duggan spent her career helping others as a family care physician, and even delivered babies early in her career. Duggan knew Spanish, and routinely volunteered with a Spanish-speaking mission that worked with human trafficking victims. She volunteered at her church, and made her family her life.
“She did this thing that she coined ‘happy day presents.’ And we still do it, but basically it’s where you see something that reminds you of somebody and you just get it for him as a little happy day present. And it’s nothing more than just, ‘Hey, I love you, and I’m thinking about you,’’’ Reamer said.
“It was really kind of heartbreaking and sweet that after she got sick, we were cleaning out some stuff, and we found this cabinet full of happy day presents that she’d meant to give to people.”
Hard as some days were, Reamer said her mother was always ready to celebrate the accomplishments of others—even if she couldn’t remember them.
“Good news you could tell her over and over, and she would be just as excited every single time. And so, like, you could tell her something that you were jazzed about, and she would just be so thrilled for you,” Reamer said.
Even still, Reamer hasn’t been able to share some of her most exciting moments with her mother.
Reamer lost her mother earlier this year when she was at the early stages of her pregnancy with her first child. Before that, she married her husband without her mom in attendance. Though not ideal, Reamer hasn’t let it stop her.
“She included Swedish ivy in her wedding bouquet, so I included Swedish ivy in my wedding bouquet,” Reamer said. “I heard this quote that said, ‘Be what you loved best about the people who are gone,’ so that’s what we try to do.”
Reamer said her and her siblings are grateful their mother was able to stay comfortable at home for the rest of her life, though she understands it’s not a reality for every family that has a loved one with dementia.
“He said, ‘I don’t have to care for your mother. I get to care for your mother. You know, it’s my honor and my privilege,’” Reamer said. “He felt very strongly that not only was this something that he was blessed to be able to do because of how much he loves her, but that it was important to him because of our belief system as Christians.”
“It was very important to him that he was living his vows, both as a Christian man and as a husband.”
Chasing toward change
Lee, who is constantly adapting Morning Pointe’s dementia programming to meet the needs of its residents, said that more than anything, she wants people to educate themselves on dementia and all the problems that go along with it—because it isn’t going away anytime soon.
According to Alzheimer’s Disease International, by 2030, over 75 million people worldwide will have some sort of dementia. Dementia cases are growing so quickly because of the increase in chronic diseases, like diabetes and hypertension, and also because the average lifespan worldwide is increasing. The longer people live, the higher their chances of developing dementia become.
She encourages people to do their research, especially if their family members are dealing with variations of dementia. She also calls for doctors to work harder to diagnose people earlier, and said healthcare workers need to be vigilant about continuing their education on dementia, as research changes constantly.
Lee said the world can’t stop advocating for dementia patients because, while their brains are suffering, they’re still human. They’re still worth caring for.
“I’ve always had a heart for those who are forgotten, I guess,” Lee said. “I don’t want them to be forgotten.”
TSF reporter Ashlyn Myers won the Pulliam School of Journalism’s award for best senior project in spring 2025 for this story on dementia patients and those who care for them. She worked for TheStatehouseFile.com every semester before graduating summa cum laude from Franklin College. She now works as a marketing and communications specialist for JCREMC.
