How much is owed to a long-estranged parent? Asking for a friend. (Yes, truly. Both my parents, and my husband’s, have been dead for a long time.)
The situation: my friend has been contacted by her brother, asking – almost demanding – that she start paying half the cost for a better quality nursing home for their father, who has dementia along with other serious health problems.
Some history: my friend’s parents had a bitter divorce involving physical abuse and infidelity on both sides when she was six and her brother was ten. (Let’s call them Letty and Bob.) Letty stayed with her mother, Bob wanted to live with his father. This wasn’t a court-ordered thing, just the way they settled on – apparently acknowledging how attached/involved each child had already been with their parents. At first the sides lived in neighboring suburbs. Bob would spend weekends with Letty and the mother. The father would occasionally pick Letty up and take her out for a meal, or sometimes a movie, but that became rarer and rarer. About two years later the father’s job required him to move several states away, and basically there stopped being contact. As Letty puts it, the last time she heard from her father was a birthday card when she turned eleven, which was over forty years ago.
Letty’s mother died about twenty years ago. Letty is married, she and her husband had three children, two of them are married with children and the third is a gay man who so far hasn’t expressed an interest in marrying/having children. Letty and husband had basically a middle class lifestyle – they get along okay, own a house, helped put the children through college, and are now trying to beef up their savings so as to have a decent retirement and never be a financial burden to their children.
The father had a more roller-coaster life. At first he did well, getting promotions and so on, then the company he worked at failed, and after that, well, apparently he got new jobs but never as good as what he’d lost.
Bob is now the manager of one store in a national chain. He is divorced, and recently remarried a much younger women with two mid-teen stepchildren. The wife doesn’t work.
So, as I said, the father had/has various ills over the years, the most severe being kidney problems. He ended retiring early. Then he developed dementia and could no longer live independently. Unfortunately the costs of care quickly ate up whatever savings/assets he had had. He had to be moved to a different nursing home that would accept what Medicaid pays.
Bob has contacted my friend. He says the conditions there are totally unacceptable and wants to move his father back to the original facility. But that will cost a lot more. Bob says he can’t cover it all himself, due to having to support his wife and new children who are coming up on college age.
He wants Louise to help pay, because “He is your father, after all.” This would be thousands of dollars a month.
Louise told Bob they can’t afford to do it, but feels really guilty about it, because in fact they COULD pay it. But it would mean cuts in their life style, drastically cutting what they could save towards their own retirement, limit what funds they might have if their children need financial help for whatever reason, what if they develop health problems themselves?, and so on and so on.
Basically she doesn’t want to make those sacrifices, especially for a man who she hardly remembers. And a brother who is virtually a stranger, and his family who are utterly unknown. But she feels massively guilty about it at the same time. Like, she was the “lucky one” and her brother got the short end of the stick, for no fault of his own.
I’m trying to make her feel better about it, but I don’t really know what to say. The pragmatic side of me says she’s doing the right thing. She was not the cause of the estrangement, it was her parents who didn’t do what was needed to keep a relationship going between her father and her, and she definitely didn’t cause the father’s financial and medical problems. Is whatever improvement her father would experience, given his advanced dementia, “worth” the negative impacts on the lives of herself and her husband, and potentially on her children/grandchildren?
And yet… I dunno. We had to deal with my mother’s dementia, and that was hard. Even though our relationship was always close and loving, it still involved sacrifices that genuinely hurt sometimes. Would or could or should I have done as much in her kind of situation? But just saying, “Nope. Good luck with that.” to her brother, is that something that will haunt her at night?