Help me advise and support my partner who is worried sick about her aging, sick parents

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m putting this out there for some advise from strangers, because I find myself rather paralysed as to how to help my partner, without being a totally selfish dick.

Background: her parents are 70 and in poor health. Her mother had a stroke at 40 which has left her with considerable disabilities. Her father has recently recovered fro prostrate cancer, which has left him weak – a much diminished man. All this poor health is exacerbated by their very heavy drinking and smoking, which seems to be their only enjoyment in life. They have few friends and are pretty much housebound, with her father being the sole carer for her mother.

We live in London, a good 5 hours drive away from their home in Wales. Her brother lives in Scotland, which is a flight away, and her sister lives even further away in Germany. So there are no immediate relatives close by. Her sole Uncle – her mother’s brother – also lives several hours away and is not known for his family responsibilities.

Back to the present, and her father’s doctors have discovered a shadow on his lung. He has had a bad cough for several months which he has been ignoring. His biopsy is this week. Obviously everyone is thinking the worst, considering his 60 years of heavy smoking.

This potential news has sent the family into a spin – with her mother, in particular, in sheer panic at the thought of being left alone. She’s on the phone nightly crying, begging my partner to promise she won’t end up in a home if her father dies, and in all honestly, if it IS lung cancer, I can’t see that he has the strength or the will to fight it. It already feels like he has given up.

My partner just doesn’t know what to do and I can see her making the leap to wanting to move back to Wales or have her mother move in with us. This thought horrifies me, if I’m honest. Her mother would need round the clock care, which we are not equipped to provide, with very busy work lives. I also think it would have a terrible impact on our relationship. I know this is utterly selfish, but I honestly don’t think I, and we, could cope with that impact on our lives. He mother could live for another 20 years.

I don’t know what to do, or what to say to my partner, who is desperate for someone to advise her what to do. I’m afraid to open my mouth, for I fear that anything I say will be totally selfish. Stepping back, I DO think having her move here would be no good for anyone, uprooting her mother from her small town to a big, scary city where she knows no one and i DO think she would be better staying in Wales, in a home where she would have a more social existence and proper care, but when I say this in my head I just feel selfish.

I realise this post makes me sound like I have written her father off as dead already, and I do keep saying we should wait for the results before going into full panic, but her parents are doing nothing to plan for the future and my parter needs someone to guide her.

Sorry for the ramble. I’m happy to hear any thoughts.

2

I don’t think you’re being selfish at all. And you’re right—constant care-giving is extremely hard and stressful and draining—physically, mentally and financially, even in the best circumstances. e.g. you really want to do it.

We took care of my younger brother for two years. We finally found a nursing home for him but by that time even that arraingment didn’t soothe our worries. He would have been better off if I’d somehow found him a place in his hometown (in another state.) The familiarity and occasional friend stopping by would have made him much happier, I think.

Her parents are doing what they what, with their vices and all. So should you two. It’s not fair IMHO for her mother to try to guilt your SO into picking up the pieces now. Besides, even if she tried she’d probably end up resenting her mother…

…who would be better off staying put IMHO. You all could start looking into “homes” now, any kind of residential place etc. Her mother might not think so now, but she could end up actually liking the place, with in-house friends and activities.

Tell your SO something I learned from this and some other experiences:
Never make a life decision for yourself based on someone else’s needs. (It rarely ends well no matter how well-meaning.)

You all would be showing your care and concern by finding her a place to relocate. And curtail the phone calls if you can. Emotional blackmail by any other name is still the same.

And this, of course, is just my own opinion.

3

I have a lot of empathy and sympathy for your situation! I know that if my FIL dies first, my MIL will want to move in with us. Luckily for me, my husband wouldn’t want that either, so we’d be united in our position.

I understand that you are afraid to air your opinions right now. I wonder if you could still have the conversation but let your partner lead.

She may not have the answers straight in her head, but you could ask her to verbalise what she is thinking about. Make it really safe for her to do so, suggest that the two of you just bring up all the options you can think of, even if they aren’t the options you’d necessarily want to take. Listen to what she says about each options. For all you know, she may be on exactly the same wavelength as you.

4

Thank you both, that’s extremely helpful. I think at the moment my partner is just swimming with thoughts of ‘OMG I’m such a terrible daughter if I don’t rush to their aid’, not helped by her sister who is much more emotionally distant in this respect.

I think discussing ALL the options is a good idea, just to air them. I think talking as much as anything will help her right now, and I just didn’t know where to start.

5

At the risk of being really stereotypical about genders (men like to solve problems, women just want their thoughts and feelings acknowledged), I think a good place to start would be to say to your partner, ‘What’s going through your mind right now? Let’s just talk about it, but not try to solve anything or make any decisions just yet.’

6

Ha, I’m a girl too, which is probably why we are both a bit paralysed by feelings at the moment. I think her sister has all the balls in the family, as she just says (to her father!) ‘well, we’ll have to put her in a home, won’t we?’

7

Apologies for the gender assumption! Hopefully others will contribute some good advice to the thread.

This is also a good reminder for those of you who haven’t had these conversations with your parents to have them now, while they are still well. We had my parents over to stay with us in July and I made sure I got updated on their latest wishes. The more open you are in talking to your parents when they are well, the easier it will be when the time comes to make those difficult decisions.

8

Speaking as someone who is a Carer, I don’t blame you. My knee-jerk reaction to being asked “what should we do?” is to advise “do what you have to to get the person in a home, or home helps, DON’T try to care for them yourself” as noble an idea it may be, caring for sick, elderly people is not a walk in the park. Most people are under the delusion it’s a case of sitting the aul’wan down with a blanket over their legs and a cup of tea, and chatting about when Victoria was on the throne. It’s not. It’s like have a very large baby (or two) in the house, and their conditions will worsen.

You will need equipment and supplies, depending on who you deal with [within the NHS] will depend on how easy it is to acquire said equipment/supplies, you can quit your jobs and claim benefits. You will loose all control of your life, everything you do will have to revolve around the elderly person. Your health (mental and physical) will suffer, and if you’re unlucky you will see/experience things that you never want to see/experience ever again. The least of these would be bed sores.

You probably won’t get any training in how to handle or care for the aul’wans, and it’s not easy trying to learn-as-you-go how to wash, dress and move an elderly person who cannot do these things for themselves, this includes wiping after they’ve used the toilet.

The Carer’s Association http://www.carersuk.org/ should be your first port of call for information/help on what to do next.

Good luck!

9

In the US there are program that offer supportive care so seniors can stay in their homes. This involves being, for example, picked up and taken to medical appointments, having a social service worker coordinate their appointments, nutritional needs, utility payments, social activities etc. It’s called PACE (Program of All-inclusive Care for the Elderly), and Medicare, the US’s elder-care benefits program, has found it to be no more expensive than residential care. Maybe the UK has developed something similar?

Also your MIL might be imagining some horrible and dreary old hospital, staring at the green-painted walls the rest of her life - residential homes are so different these days, but maybe she doesn’t know.

10

Yes, the UK does have similar programmes, both privately and publicly funded, depending on circumstance. I certainly think this is a place to start, at least in the short term, although I can’t help feeling she would feel dreadfully lonely in the longer term.

I personally think she would be better off in a home, with a more active social life than she has even now (which is practically nil) but I’m conscious of projecting how I would feel about such a situation onto her mother, who isn’t terribly sociable at the moment – although more through long-term circumstance and habit than personality, I think.

Who knows, an active, sociable home could be the making of her!

11

Speaking as someone who has twice helped care for elderly relatives that needed round-the-clock attention…

You really MUST consider a “home”. Of some sort. And look into home care and/or hospice as appropriate.

Looking back on the two experiences all I can say is thank god they only lasted a couple months. If it had turned into years we would have had no choice but to look into some sort of residential care facility despite a half dozen able-bodied adults wanting to pitch in for each one, and in one case one of those relatives being a hospice director by profession. It’s either a team, or one person completely sacrifices his or her own life to care for the invalid… and that person will still need help from time to time.

I don’t know what variety of services and alternatives are available to you but you must look into ALL of them, even the ones that at this point you don’t want. A well-chosen facility that provides the needed care and is in familiar surroundings near people she knows could well be far superior to uprooting her to live in a new place with people who will come to resent her for being a mental, physical, and emotional drain.

And yeah, caring for a true invalid will introduce you to indignities and unpleasant things you’ll want to scrub from your brain. I don’t regret doing it for my mother and father in law but it was incredibly hard to do it.

12

Yet do not let what they wanted Way Back When take precedence over What’s Best Now if it happens to be different.

The three years Dad was sick were quite horrible for many reasons: most of the first year I was away, and since he never talked to me on the phone (other than “I’ll pass you with your mother”) and Mom refused to talk about anything important (the woman’s record call cost me more than a month of rent - and the most serious subject she talked about was the weather), he though I wasn’t even asking about him. Then when I moved back home to help care for him, Mom and the Bros were in complete denial; that may have been the only time I’ve been in complete agreement with my sister-in-law about something, the something being “he’s going to die from this, and these three are closing their eyes, inserting their little fingers in their ears and going ‘nanananah can’t hear ya’”.

The last year and a half of my grandfather’s life, grandma was depressed. The depression was situational (as thankfully are the immense majority of depressions in my family) and eventually lifted once he died; trying to take care of a woman who can’t hear because she spends so much time pondering the blackness of life and a man who spreads his shit all over the house isn’t a task for the meek.
I sort of knew what I was getting into when I moved back home; I wouldn’t have done it (no way no how) if I’d had a partner, because I knew I was going to be living in a black hole for as long as Dad took to die. What I hadn’t known was that the hole would get even blacker once he died; I didn’t so much leave home again as flee it running, with the parish priests, my brothers and her friends grabbing my mother to keep her away from my throat.

These aren’t so much for you to answer as for you both to consider:
first, I agree that moving your MiL to London means uprooting her and is therefore not a Good Idea. Both my mother and hers get the blues if they’re away from their home towns for more than two weeks; the longer, the darker.
Second, if your partner moves back, what will happen with her life? Who does she have there? Will she be able to get her own space in her mother’s home, or will it be as it is for me, that I haven’t had a space there that’s mine since I went away to college? My mother has problems respecting my boundaries in my house: in hers, what boundaries? “What do you mean, you’re shitting and would like to be able to do it alone? But I want to speak with you about the menus!” “While I’m shitting? Mom, I can’t shit and think about food at the same time, get the fuck out!”

I think you need to listen more than you talk, when you two talk about this, and I think you two need to look at all the possibilities. And yes, one possibility may be a home back in Wales, but if it’s a home where your MiL already knows people, perhaps in her home town, it’s going to be less bad for everybody concerned than trying to have her in your house - or than your partner moving back into a house where she’s expected to do all the work without having any power to decide, and yes I know I’m projecting. Fuck projecting with a rusty dildo, it’s still something that needs to be taken into account.
PS: I’m having flashbacks. Gaaaah!

13

I’m sorry you and your partner are going through all this, SanVito – hope you both find the best ways to deal with the situation.

That said, I’m going to move this from MPSIMS to our advice-giving forum, IMHO.

twickster, MPSIMS moderator

14

My advice is don’t get ahead of yourself. The Mother may actually only need a ‘change’, though she can’t see that yet. Consider opening your home to her for a few weeks. Difficult weeks, I’m sure. But while she’s there you have an opportunity to let her see what it would really be like.

No doting. Little accommodating. Give her a chance to see, up close, how busy your lives are. How little time you’ll have for her. How hard it will be for her, not knowing anyone, or where things are, etc. After a couple of weeks she may well be of a different opinion about leaving her home. She may begin to imagine other choices. Like staying in her home town and moving into ‘assisted living’ housing. (You must have some version of this, independent apartment units, diningroom available, hair dresser on site, handyman for assistance lifting, taxi services for Dr appt’s etc, etc.)

You might consider giving such a thing a try, at some point, and Good Luck to you all!