COLUMBUS, Ohio — Kathy Ryan thinks the world of her mother.
“She is so sweet,” Ryan said. “She would give you her clothes, she would give you the shirt off her back.”
Ryan’s mom is known as “Grandma Honey” by friends and family. She earned the name by using the enduring term for everyone she meets.
“Everyone is ‘honey’ to her,” Ryan said. “Whenever she meets someone it’s ‘oh honey’ this, ‘oh honey’ that. When they would come over to the house, ‘well, honey are you hungry? Can I get you something to eat?’”
This mother-daughter duo is very close, they even lived together until two years ago.
“She lives at Darby Glenn nursing home and she’s been there, it will be two years in June,” Ryan said. “She lived with us for 15 years and it just got to where we couldn’t take care of her anymore.”
While Grandma Honey was adjusting to her new life in the nursing home, the pandemic hit.
“Of course we weren’t allowed to visit. It was very heartbreaking for both of us because I used to go every day to see my mother.” Ryan said. “We couldn’t even do a window visit because her room is inside facing the courtyard. Eventually, they let us do a window visit. They brought her down in a glass door and we would be outside, it wasn’t very easy to see her.”
When the family could finally see their beloved Grandma Honey through a glass window, they found ways to make their time extra-special with signs they held up with messages of love.
Then, last May, nearly a year ago, Ryan got a call from Grandma Honey’s nursing home that made her heart drop.
“They said my mother tested positive for COVID and they were moving her to a different facility,” Ryan recalled. “They weren’t ready and set up for having COVID patients.”
Ryan was worried about complications from the illness because her mom is in her 90’s.
“When they told me she had COVID, I thought with her age and everything, I’m like ‘this is it, how can my mom survive this?”
Grandma Honey was able to make a full recovery.
Ryan and her mom are now both fully vaccinated and were enjoying visits again until someone else at the nursing home contracted COVID-19 two weeks ago.
“So we couldn’t visit her again for 14 days,” Ryan said. “Then we couldn’t even do an outside visit with her.”
The family thought they would have to spend Mother’s Day apart while Grandma Honey was in quarantine.
“They told me we would be able to visit on Mother’s day,” Ryan said. “I told mom and she is all happy now because it just breaks her heart.”
Ryan plans to celebrate the day with her mom by bringing her food and presents.
“We will go spend some time with her,” she said. “Just talk and giggle and laugh and have a good time.”
