What a heartbreaking and accurate picture you paint. Our nursing home is a specialist one for severly mentally ill patients, mainly dementia, and what you say is all too familiar. You meet the resident, you get to know them and what they are when you know them is often so vastly different from what the families tell you they were like and the photographs you see. My grandfather has gone the same way, once he was an engineer, with a major role in building Baghdad hospital, now he is a 5 and half foot child. It's the hardest thing in the world to only know these people at the end and see them at their lowest. The reason you do what you do and the reason our home does what it does is that if we didn't then no one would. You make a difference, even if it's only for a little while and that's a huge thing so don't ever underestimate the good you're doing.