AGING PARENTS

thx ENBB - not really, my mom lives in a big condo in the big city but is pretty isolated - her friends are old, frail and scattered. I think the only solution is to have her live with me or a

oops
... or at least close to me, but I realise that, to some extent, I'm procrastinating in starting this process (ie. sell her house, drive her back with me kicking and screaming) because sub-consciously i'm still hoping/expecting validation from her, that she'd wake up sober one day and say "sure, you're right, I'll come with you". Clearly taht's never gonna happen. Everyone around me is telling me that I'm past the stage where I need worry about her agreeemnt and her comfort and that I should force things through. Pretty difficult to accept though.

Respectfully, rearranging your whole life in order to care for an addict doesn't seem like a good long-term strategy.

well I can't imagine that said addict will live that long tbh - but you're right, problem though is I don't see any alternatives...
My mom is clearly not fit to live on her own but otoh legally I am in no position to impose anything on her (eg. if I dragged her and put her in a elderly home, she'd escape immediately).
Some people tell me that I should resign myself to accept the situation and let her drink herself to death but, besides the moral aspect, I know that I'd just be in a state of constant panic which would prevent me from living my life all the same
Anyway sorry for hijacking this thread with my freak-outs.

I get it. I mean it wasn't my mom but it was someone I cared about, and I've seen other ppl go through similar.

"besides the moral aspect" -- do you think it's immoral to let someone choose addiction/accept that people sometimes choose addiction?

That's very similar to what my parents are going through with my grandfathers. I think, luckily, that my mom's dad is going to end up in an assisted living place after his release from the hospital, which is really what he's needed for years.

I think the addiction part in b's story there is an extenuating circumstance, but it's just another factor that makes someone unable to care for him/herself. If you can't convince someone that it's in their best interest to change their life, you kind of have to wait until their life changes to the extent it's no longer viable. It doesn't mean that you don't want them to have some help or at least compassion, and cutting off all help is really difficult. I think it's a matter of finding the balance where you feel like a decent person without being an enabler.

Also there's something about the end of life that makes me want to throw all the usual things I think are true about addiction/addicts -- extra so when it's a parent. Addiction may be involved but it's just not the primary thing. I totally understand the impulse to house mom under these circumstances.

my main goal atm is getting my parents out of their crumbling house and into a place they are safe and comfortable

do you think it's immoral to let someone choose addiction/accept that people sometimes choose addiction?

Tricky question - not sure where exactly I stand on this on principle, but I get your drift of course.
In the case of aging parents, I still think there is I have some kind of moral responsibility to protect them from themselves (be it from addiction or anything really).
In my mom's specific case, decades of drinking and a pretty horrific accident 4 years ago have significantly affected her intellectual abilities, so I'm not sure I would ever think of her as "choosing" addiction.

People who -choose- addiction can be VERY controlling, even if they are not physically strong.

People suffering from dementia and aging/ illness-related tantrums can also be so manipulative that if you seek therapy for it - as I did - they will tell you to quit feeling guilty and get the hell out. This is what I went through with Dad, but he was so sick I decided to stick with him until he died. My brother and sister bailed on him, though. Can't say I blame them.

problem though is I don't see any alternatives...

When every choice open to you comes with deeply undesirable consequences, the only thing you can do is make the least bad choice that seems most manageable and get on with it. It sounds like you understand this already.

btw, it is ok to feel wretched about the whole thing. that's just one more lousy piece of the situation you'll have to manage as best you can -- and while it may be tempting to shove those feelings aside as unproductive, my experience has been that it works better to find at least a small slice of brain space and time to acknowledge them on a somewhat regular basis.

good luck. I'm sure you're going to do about as well as anyone could in the circumstances.

tbh - I think my mom would probably be diagnosed with mild alcoholic dementia at this point. I guess I've been denying it for a while because dementia seems to imply "CRAY-ZAY!", but it's clear that her short term memory is shot and complex reasoning, planning or decision-making are all out of reach. I don't know to which extent psychiatric help would be of help

Wouldn't that be actual physical damage from alcohol? I'm not sure what is done about that. Epithets like "crazy" aren't helpful.

"dementia" is just a term that means a loss of mental ability, not insanity. psychiatric help is unlikely to restore her mental abilities. even quitting drinking would be more in the nature of slowing the damage rather than reversing it.

An acquaintance of mine drank heavily for twenty years, and now he permanently slurs his words. He can't remember my name half the time, either. It's a waste of faculties that makes me cry.

My maternal grandfather, following his disastrous fall next to his mailbox and hospitalization, is now in a nursing/assisted living facility! We now know he's safe, forced to change clothes on a regular basis, and they bathe him twice per week. My mom had his mail forwarded to her and she can now handle his finances from home, and visit him less regularly, and no longer feels obligated to do his laundry.

Grandfather #2 is still being obnoxious, but my parents already seem like a burden has been lifted.

That must be a huge relief. How is he adjusting?

Slowly but surely, it sounds like. He enjoys talking to people, so I'm sure he'll grow to like it. I think he's currently telling people about his mean daughter who won't let him go home, but that'll pass.

It seems like bitching about your ungrateful damn kids to the other residents of a senior center would offer good opportunity for bonding through shared misery.

Lord knows I would never say the same about my ungrateful damn parents.

My dad has advancing Alzheimer's and has finally become unmoored enough that his constant agitation and anxiety seem to have disappeared. My mom is so relieved. "He's really so nice and pleasant, he's much more like the person he was when we got married!" Because my dad could be very difficult and hard on her, I'm actually happy for her (along with the soup of other emotions I feel).

The Biggest Threat To Your Retirement Portfolio: Mild Dementia

(follow-up discussion on MetaFilter: http://www.metafilter.com/150240/The-Biggest-Threat-To-Your-Retirement-Portfolio-Mild-Dementia)

I'm fairly certain my mom now has dementia. I'm in the process of trying to get my dad to take her to the doc specifically for this but he's reluctant as he doesn't think they can do anything for it. Apparently she sleeps most of the day but when she's up it's like she's far away and often confused. She starts sentences and stops mid-way forgetting what she was going to say and a lot of the time it's mixed up or incoherent anyway. I'm so unbelievably sad over it. While she hasn't been the mother I grew up with in many many years this is something entirely different. I miss my mom and the fact that I'm now near certain I'll never have her back is something I don't know how to process.

oh enbb, i'm so sorry, that’s pain beyond words

Aw thank you, Drash. I'm sure I'll figure out how to handle
It but it's tough especially since I'm far away. If it's any indication of my mental state rn I just started crying on the T when I read your tweet because I was touched.

very sorry to hear ENBB. This sounds awfully familiar :-/
After denying it through false hopes and what-ifs, I've been grieving over the fact that I'll never have a chat with my "real" mom for a couple of years now.
You'll come to accept it I'm sure but it is indeed a very painful process (after a while it gets even difficult to remember the person when they were healthy, which is yet another kind of sad).

Hang in there, cherish the past but stay invested in your own present and future.

I'm your sister in grief, ENBB. I don't know whether it is helpful or not helpful that my dad has a diagnosis (Alzheimer's) and, as fate would have it, I care for hospice patients with AD pretty much every day. There are many heartbreaking ways to lose a loved one, but dementia is a special kind of heartbreak. Sending you as much strength and peace as can be mustered in difficult times :(

ENBB, quincie I'm so sorry you're both dealing with this. Love to you both.

Elvis that's an interesting and scary article. I regularly participate in a clinic my firm offers where we help seniors put together powers of attorney for medical and financial concerns and I'm pretty evangelical about getting your POA/medical directive paperwork ducks in a row ASAP, as in once you have kids or when you hit 40, whichever comes first.

ENBB that sounds incredibly hard.
That article has me sightly worried about my dad. I don't think he's got dementia at all but he is prone to believing everything he reads about finances and it wouldn't take much in his old age to get him to make awful decisions. I can't count the number of (legit but pointless) 'schemes' he's tried to partake in already.

My mum never really talks about finances with him but does work with elderly and dementia patients so I guess it's a conversation worth having.

visited parents for all of last week. it was bizarre explaining to my dad who his brother is, while at the same time he was sufficiently oriented to know me, my wife, our kids, and what we all had been doing all day. crazy transient memory holes.

more usual was his being able to give addresses and describe the streets in Pittsburgh where each of his granddads had lived in 1944, but not recall where he had lived between 1992 and 2014.

There is a lot of good advice in that article, which reminded me of a few situations I've seen IRL. A friend of my wife only discovered the extent of her father's dementia when she happened to find out he was paying his mortgage several times a month.

When my father asked me to start helping him manage his finances, my first problem was figuring out where all his assets were and how to get access to those accounts. His memory is erratic now, to say the least, and it was not until I had been shuffling through paper statements for a few weeks that I was able to track down everything.

I had always imagined he kept this information in a few orderly files ... he did, but by the time I saw them, the files were about 15 years out of date.

Thanks Quincie and Carl and Kinder and Bad <3

The thing with my mom is that she's on some sedatives and SRRIs and stuff that I think are making everything worse. Even if my dad is right and that a diagnosis wouldn't mean much, maybe it would change what she's being prescribed? I don't know.

My dad is her sole caretaker and pretty much waits on her hand and foot and he's a really young and active 71 year old but has no life and I just feel horrible for him. Being so far away makes it worse and I feel guilty that I can't help. I've even wondered if I should move down there but they're the ones who moved to Florida, not me! :(

She definitely needs a neuro appointment and get her meds looked at.

That's what I said!! :(

my mom turned 72 today, upon which i learned that she's part of an experimental drug trial because she has alzheimer's markers.

she seems remarkably chill about it, after a period of being not chill/not telling me. she also seems to not be totally following the (admittedly complex) series of historical novels that i gave her and she's claimed to have read.

she's already talking about maybe having to move; some years ago she said she wouldn't survive without her garden.

as an only child i always knew this was coming, but that doesn't mean i'm going to be good at it

ugh, that is my greatest fear about my parents (mom turns 70 next month). so far the aging parents' maladies have been arthritis, prostate cancer, cataracts, and high blood pressure. I know it's gonna get worse though.

oh and type 2 diabetes

Mine will be 76 this year. The tumor in her lung has gotten bigger and she says she doesn't want to treat it. She had a PET scan yesterday to see if the cancer has spread anywhere else. I guess we'll get the results next week and go from there.

spent the last two years m/l helping both my parents deal with the decline of theirs which ultimately has caused a Faulknerian dissolution of extended family relationships (such as they were anyway) on my mom's side. dads estranged dad passed and he wasn't invited to the funeral, not sure if his likewise estranged mom is still alive. All the battles over driving and getting help with daily basic tasks converted to a scramble to find a suitable assisted living/hospice for my mom's mom (she won a spot at an exclusive joint because my dad's beloved grandmother passed there in the 80s and they still remembered her).

It brought my immediate family much closer together and put the issue into perspective for when my parents advance in age, but it has been a hard 18 months or so and my heart goes out to you folks

sorry to hear about everyone's aging parents :(
we have some recently diagnosed issues in my family that i don't feel like typing about but i am pretty into the idea of finding a support group locally where i can talk about it off the record
are there things like that? for only children of aging parents?

Thanks, Elvis. The follow-up discussion is even better, with comments and links.

my mom turned 72 today, upon which i learned that she's part of an experimental drug trial because she has alzheimer's markers.

heyo your mom and my dad may very well be in the same clinical trial, tho my dad is beyond MCI markers and definitely AD :(

xxpost La Lechera idk if these are in your area but there's a number to call, they may have more info to help u find a group

http://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/fss/supp_info/caregiving_support.html

Thank you. Honestly I can't bear to google for it. I'll look into it at some point but srsly there's a huge feeling of betrayal about typing (on or off record) about my parents. I'm more comfortable talking aloud and letting the words float away instead of seeing them.

I never got to see my father age. Cancer took him away from my mother and me before he turned sixty, so it was illness that robbed us of him, though in helping take care of him I got my first lessons in caregiving, something that proved invaluable when it came time for me to step up and become my mother's caregiver. I was a sort of caregiver to her beginning as soon as my dad passed away in 2003, but when I really became my mom's caregiver was in the middle of 2006, when I stayed with her in the hospital for the very direct time. From that moment on I was with her at practically every doctor's appiintment, during every hospitalization, I drove her everywhere, made all her meals, and so on. I also balanced that with work and ended up paying someone to be a professional caregiver to her for a couple of hours a day while I was at work, just so she could have some time in that time period when I didn't have to worry about her and she could do stuff she couldn't do by herself, such as go to the bathroom or take a shower. But when she had to go on dialysis it provided one setback for me and when she had to do hemodialysis I had to either work part-time to accommodate two of the three times a week she had dialysis into my schedule (and she really needed someone else there to get her stuff from her bag or readjust her or what have you), but when she went on peritoneal dialysis, after a period of time when I had to be off work so she could get through the all-manual treatment period of that type of dialysis, when we finally got to the "cycler" or machine stage, I could go back to work and only worry about rushing home from work to do the one manual treatment for the day and something called the "exit site care" (where you clean the site where the dialysis catheter is -- it's something that has to be done once a day), so I could hook her up to the dialysis machine in time for me to be able to disconnect her before I went to work. That and a host of appointments every Friday was our life from March of 2014 to May 30 of this year, when she was hospitalized for what ended up being her final time. I lost her on July 2 and have aged considerably on the inside as a result. I feel like I'm a sixty-year-old in a thirtysomething's body, and while I have a wealth of hard-earned caregiver wisdom inside me, I also have a giant hole inside me too and it's been very tough trying to recover from losing the one parent I had in this world. But I am relying on some good friends and am eternally grateful for that, as well as a local amputee support group my mom and I had joined in March 2010, several months after she became a right, below the knee amputee (rbka). In fact, I'm typing this message out while at one of their meetings, because they've welcomed me to be a permanent part of the community even after my mom's passing. I am also blessed to have a wonderful primary care physician who saw me two and a half weeks ago and diagnosed me with major depression as a result of grief, and after a little over two weeks of being on some antidepressants I am finally ready to go back to work. But it's going to take me a very long time to recover from this loss, and I'm not going to try to rush it like I did when my dad passed away, which caused me to be a terrible person to be around for a good long while, which is something some of you will remember from the last time I was here around these parts. I have done a whole lot of growing up since then and am jot the same person I used to be, and I am going to let the grief flow through naturally. And then I'll continue to live my life, because that's what Mom would've wanted from me, and I want to honor her with my life for as long as I live.

So... hello again.

Sorry, "very first time", not "very direct time". And sorry for the super long paragraph. I'm typing this while paying attention to the other people's testimonials.

LL, you can also call an area hospital that may offer treatment for the diagnosis and ask about support groups. In my (thankfully at this point limited) experience with Advocate Illinois Masonic, for one specific example, they have really good referral services like that. My insurance plan also comes with a nurse you can call for help with various things, so that's another possible avenue. Also, if this is something that hospice may handle, you could call Illinois Hospice and see if they can direct you somewhere.

Also: <3

mookie, sarah, art, dee - much love to you all

You're a sweetheart, carl agatha (and I don't even know who you are). Anyway, today I'm back at work for the first time since losing my mom and they have been so accommodating to me. But it feels odd not getting those phone calls I always used to get from Mom or knowing that I don't have a reason to rush home tonight. As stressful as it was being Mom's caregiver, I miss it desperately and I still feel like I need my mom, even the mom with disabilities and plenty of medical issues I had for the last six years. I need to hear her voice again and feel her hugging me.

Ok, going to stop right now because I do not like crying at work. But if anyone needs logistical advice, I can try to help.