Dealing with a parent who is in denial

Right, but they can still say no.

We’re not using “right” in some lofty moral sense. Your aging parents have literal, legal rights to their home. Until/unless you have them legally declared incompetent by a judge (not a nurse or doctor, although the judge will examine the testimony of a doctor), they can tell you to fuck off, call the police, and have you escorted off the premises. Legally.

Very well said - and something adult children often forget. I think the children also forget that they also have the choice not to enable the parents. “Okay, mom and dad, you choose to live this way. That is your right. But do not call me when things go badly.” Of course, getting to that state of mind, sticking with it, and being comfortable with it, is hugely difficult if not impossible for someone who loves their parents.

I acknowledge also that there is a flipside of the controlling adult child, who infantilizes their parents. That child should butt out until needed.

There really ARE a lot of advantages to people not living to advanced age - especially if in poor health.

Thats an easy one to handle, unless of course she’s a mechanic. :smiley:

Its the ol’ powdered butt syndrome. No one wants to be told what to do by someone whose butt they have powdered.

My mom is in her mid 60’s and she’s a financial mess. She makes really horrible decisions and when I try to talk to her about her choices she just shuts down. Then she’ll show up in a new car! She drives me nuts. I finally just have to tune her nonsense out in order to have a semi-decent relationship with her.

It is extremely hard for some to give up what they perceive as their freedom. I recommend to have a family meeting about this. If it’s just you, then a visit to the doctor’s office with her and discuss the situation might be helpful. Of course, prompt the doctor about the discussion ahead of time.

There is no shame in moving to a ranch style home where it’s all one-floor living.

This is a really good suggestion. Doctors see this all the time, and can be strong allies on the side of reason. Of course, if the kid is being unreasonable, they can advocate for their patient.

At one early Dr. visit, my wife told her mom that they didn’t want her to drive because it would be terrible if she killed or maimed someone else. MIL responded, “I’m willing to take that risk.” Wife and Dr. met eyes, and Dr. wasted no time in supporting my wife’s and her siblings’ efforts. Not sure if MIL was ALWAYS a sociopath… :smack:

For those of you whose parents are having stair problems, there’s a simple solution. Just tell them to sit down to go up and down the stairs. It’s not the way they’ve always done it, but it’s safe even for a person with vertigo.

If they feel that’s too undignified, even when they’re home alone, there are mechanical chairs which are much less expensive than I would have thought. They can go as low as 2-3,000.00. While I realize that isn’t chump change, it’s far less than the 10-15,000 I would have guessed.

My sympathies. ** The rest of this is me ranting about how much it can suck to have aging parents - feel free to skip it!

I have elderly parents - one of whom has advanced Alzheimers. He no longer knows anyone - up to and including himself - most of the time. Also, he has recently started occasionally reacting violently when anything he doesn’t expect happens. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the cognitive function left to realistically “expect” much of anything.

This is not actually the problem - we’ve all known this was coming for years now. Realistically speaking, my dad died some years ago. The problem is my equally-elderly mother, who is still perfectly legally competent. She won’t even consider a residential facility for the two of them. To be fair, she knows - we all know - that a residential facility is the last thing he wanted when he still was competent. Unfortunately, his solution for this scenario when he was competent was for someone to shoot him and “put him out of his misery”. This is not a realistic option, Dad. Thanks for that though.

He sleeps no more than three or four hours a night, which means my mother (who is his only caretaker - she doesn’t even have a respite worker or a home health aide or anything, because my dad got physical with the last one and she quit - rightly so) is only getting three or four hours of sleep a night - which is a lot less than is healthy for her (left to her own devices, she’s an 8 or 9 hour girl). She can’t trust him unsupervised. He won’t stay in the house, and if he does, he does things like try to make coffee by putting the plastic pot from the automatic coffee maker on the goddamn stovetop. Or can’t find any of the bathrooms and soils himself - which leads to a fight about the shower he must then take and doesn’t want to.

But she won’t consider residential care. Her arguments against it are fairly specious. She tells me how expensive it is, which it entirely true actually. But my parents started planning for this eventuality and have done everything possible to shield their assets - which was done well over a decade ago. The majority of their assets were migrated to a Living Trust over a decade ago, so it really only impacts their retirement income payments, and trust me, they have sufficient shielded assets to be perfectly peachy. Then she tells me how he didn’t want this - which is also true, but he wanted EVEN LESS for my mom to kill herself trying to be his sole caretaker. And even less than that he wanted himself to hurt her in the process.

This is all complicated by the fact that she insists on spending literally half the year in my hometown - which is in rural Alaska. Rural, 1,500 people living on an island, only has the equivalent of an urgent care facility, at least 1,800 miles from the nearest relative, Alaska. It is also complicated by the fact that my mother - in the name of “not worrying the children” doesn’t tell us important things - like about the time Dad was so agitated he was pacing in front of the public library screaming obscenities and throwing rocks at passing cars and they had to take him to the hospital by force and sedate him. (Thank you Facebook - one of my parents’ oldest friends, who is FB friends with my brother and I - ratted them out on that one.)

She doesn’t want to think about it, she doesn’t want to make ultimate decisions about it, and she freely admits that she is ostriching it up on the whole subject. And then she forcibly changes the subject.

My siblings and I can insist as forcefully as we like that the time has come, but she is his legal guardian and she is entirely legally competent. And really, his physical needs are being more than met - she’s not doing a bad job of caretaking for him. She is in all probability doing a much better job than a residential facility. He’s in great physical health, and there is nothing and no-one in the world that can do anything about his mental condition. That ship has sailed. She mostly had the respite lady so she could go play bridge with her friends for a couple of hours a couple of days a week and have a break. But she’s fucking exhausted and this is slowly killing her and there is just not a whole lot anyone can do about it.

My siblings and I have a call rotation - someone talks to her every day. As it works out, mostly she gets two or three calls a day (there are four of us, but I try to call every other day, and the grandkids like to call her fairly often too). We’ve all informed her that if there’s ever a period of time longer than 12 hours where she doesn’t get in touch with one of us, we’re calling the damn cops. My brother and I also take turns attempting to persuade her to rethink her stance on residential facilities and permanent care and the like. It’s my turn this month - yay =P My half-sisters are spared this particular joy for political reasons - they are my father’s children but not my mother’s, so nobody wants to set up a dynamic that even gets close to implying they think she’s not caring for him (they do not, and are desperately worried about her health). The do a lot of the options-research and help my brother and I come up with arguments - the hope being eventually my mom will run out of counterarguments.

All of us - in turn - have offered, nay, insisted on, my parents moving in with each of us - to no avail. I am logistically the most likely (I have no children, live in Arizona, where home health care is abundant and relatively cheap, and will be happy to sell my current home for just about any architectural structure that works best for the purpose of having them move in). My brother is the sentimental favorite - he can dangle the lure of “closer to the grandkids” and also lives in an area where home health care is abundant and cheap. One of my sisters lives in the DC area in a tiny house - she’s offered sincerely, but that would be logistically complicated. The other lives in BFE Ohio, ditto. My mom doesn’t want to live with any of us - she wants to live on her own because, goddamn it, she is an adult. She also wants no part of moving into a residential facility herself - on the totally reasonable basis that they are jails for adults.

The only positive part of this whole mess is that it’s forced me to have several very, very forceful conversations with my husband about how he is ***not ***allowed to handle things if I go the way of my dad.

So sad. You have my sympathies. I hope A LOT of middle aged folk in similar situations figure out something to do in advance - possibly stockpile medications for an OD - and privately enlist the assistance of someone to assist you in a final act of love.

At least having a realistic plan that does not involve expecting your loved ones to murder you would be a big help, really.

My mom actually has a seriously hard-core plan for managing all of the financial bits. She’s just incredibly stubborn about feeling like she has to be the one to do all the caretaking - at the expense of her own well-being. I see her perspective on this - she does do a better job than any paid caretaker would. He doesn’t have medical needs that need attending to at all. Frankly, his doctors tell her he’s in phenomenal physical condition for a dude his age. This is less comforting news than it might be otherwise.

It’s a profoundly weird mental state when you are devoutly and sincerely hoping for a much-loved parent to suddenly drop dead of a massive heart attack or something similar, let me tell you.

I know how you feel.

What would you consider a realistic plan? I found the scene in Still Alice quite chilling - she tried to take precautions, but when the time came, was to impaired to carry them through. Do you kill yourself when diagnosed, or at the first sign of decline, just because you are still able to?

If my wife asked, I’d find a way to put her out of her misery. And I’m content she and/or my kids would do the same for me. I’d do the same for my dog…

If you intend to jump before you’re pushed, you can’t cling to the windowsill by your fingertips until the building falls down of its own accord.