To my neurotic uncle: %^@#$^&#$^&#!!!

The BBQ Pit
1

gong

My grandmother just turned 90, and my mom and her brothers are dealing with the mortality of their mother and themselves.

We are in the process of transitioning her from her home of the last 45 or so years of her life, to an assisted living facility nearby. My grandfather passed away in 1978.

It has not been an easy transition. Everyone is stressed. My older uncle (divorced 3…or is it 4?..times, and who has no children and lives alone) is who my grandmother selected to be the executor of her estate, living will, power of attorney, etc, whathaveyou. I assume that her motive was to put more of the burden on Harvey because he just has less going on in general in his life, and that is how it has been his entire life.

My mom, 61, (the middle child) lives alone (widowed) on 60 acres of wild backcountry, 7 hours north of where my grandmother and two uncles live. She dispatches a volunteer fire company out of her living room. Has a horse, a dog, and two cats to feed.

My younger uncle 55, has a wife and two kids in college. One at UCLA and one out at Monterey Penninsula.

My older uncle, 64, is a retired school teacher who plays cribbage.

The man is a complete wreck if there are any loose ends of any type, ever.

Case in point: Grandma would rather live at an assisted living facility than move in with him.

Further, he stresses out everyone in the family who ever speaks to him, mostly because he is impossible to communicate with.

They decided to sell my grandmother’s car. My wife and I have been looking for a second car. We recently transitioned my wife to a part time work week so that she can concentrate on her music career. We previously worked at the same location, and had no problem sharing one car. Now that isn’t a good option anymore, and we think we need a 2nd car. We had previously expressed interest in the car, should they decide to get rid of it.

Somehow, my (stressed and coping) mom mis-communicated to her older brother, (during a conversation in which he told her that he might have a buyer for grandma’s car) that my wife and I were not actually interested in buying it and he should go ahead and sell it if he was worrying about it so much.

Earlier today my uncle offered to sell it to some random woman at the smog-check place for a seriously under-valued price (my grandmother put some dings in the body, but it is a solid running late model Ford Taurus). He was unwilling to call the (loose, verbal) deal off with this other buyer when I called him as soon as I had heard of the misunderstanding with my mom. He just can’t handle a change in course like that.

We would have paid him more. We would have kept things nice and simple for him. Everyone in the family would’ve benefited from the exchange.

But he is so graceless socially, even members of his own family can’t hold conversations with him. And he’s dealing (legally) with everything that is going on with this huge transition in his mother’s life.

Throw in the towel already, Uncle Fucker. Hand the responsibilities over to a functional member of the family. While you’re at it, let’s just find a nice place for you where you can play cribbage and have your life cookie-cuttered for you. Maybe we can get a two-for-one deal. You could have a room right next to grandma, where you can yell at her all you want (she can make sure she can’t hear you anyway) for having the audacity to grow weak or lose her hearing or forget some minor detail after 90 years of listening your annoying voice freak the fuck out over every little thing.

deep breath

gong

2

You sealed the deal on this one. Since you mentioned it, all I can think of is “Shut Your Fucking Face, Uncle Fucker”.

Not that your situation doesn’t suck. I would figure out a way for the rst of the family to wrest control of the estate from the mewling cribbage player, were I you.

3

Why are you blaming your uncle?

“Somehow, my (stressed and coping) mom mis-communicated to her older brother, (during a conversation in which he told her that he might have a buyer for grandma’s car) that my wife and I were not actually interested in buying it and he should go ahead and sell it if he was worrying about it so much.”

Sounds like the blame, if there is any, is on your mom. Refusing to cancel a done deal for a family member is not a black and white moral decision.

4

I don’t doubt that he’s a pain in the ass to deal with, but I have to say that there is nothing more frustrating than being the on-the-ground caregiver and having people hundreds of miles away playing backseat quarterback. She’s his mom, too, and this is an emotional wringer. You also can’t imagine just how many hundreds of decisions have to be made at a time like this, each of them filled with emotions: selling the car, admitting you are never going to drive again, is a huge moment when you are growing old. It’s finally admitting that you are dependent on others for the basic functions of life. If the process has been painful to her, and there’s been confusion about whether or not you want the car, I can really see wanting it to just be over–especially if there is any doubt about your own commitment. Your grandmother may also prefer it go outside the family because if it stays within the family (even sold at a fair price), that may feel like people are taking her stuff before she’s even cold.

It sounds like he loves your grandmother and is trying to do what’s best and fair for her to the best of his abilities. That’s a lot.

5

Also, from his point of view, in the grand scheme of things, whether or not you get a slightly better deal on a used car is not a priority. If you were willing to pay the market price for it, you can pay the market price for some other car. If you were trying to save a little money, that’s fair enough, but it’s weird to think that your savings would be a huge priority for an uncle you apparently don’t know well enough to communicate directly with (you call him through your mom). He’s dealing with helping your grandmother start the last chapter in her life. Whether or not you save a couple hundred bucks probably isn’t a big deal to him right now.

6

It’s a pain in the ass to take care of estates. You can’t do it when you worry about all the relatives that have verbal input, but don’t handle the estate. He’s taking care of his mother, and she’s the one that matters in this. He has no need to worry about you getting a car, also at one point the purchase was called off. Being unclear wasn’t his fault, and he has somebody that has an offer on the table. Be sure to leave your grandma out of the middle of this. Involving her would make her life worse for no purpose.

7

I wasn’t clear. He’s not “taking care of his mother”. He’s completely dysfunctional and gets in the way of the people who are actually taking care of her. There is no one who is arm-chair quarterbacking. What we have is a quarterback who stands on the sidelines worrying over the playbook, over and over and over again. No decisions are made. Except the car. All of a sudden he decides to be decisive. And he is screwing my grandmother out of good money. We would have easily doubled the price he’s getting for the car. It was a “good deal” for us not because we’re short changing my family on the price, it is because we know that it is just banged up on the outside, and on the inside it is a solid “grandma car”. You can’t ask for a better used car. She has never put it through it’s paces or done any damage going faster than 10 mph. And Salesfolk always want the buyer to believe that the used car they’re buying is indeed a “grandma car”. We knew this one to be the authentic goods.

But really, the car thing was just a frustrating familial miscommunication. A straw that broke the camel’s back. My mother can’t get off the phone fast enough with my older uncle, who was calling freaking out about the car 2 days after they had decided to sell it. 2 days and he’s freaking out calling my Mom asking her what to do. By the second conversation in 24 hours on the topic, mom would have told him anything to just get him off the phone.

My grandmother’s situation is exacerbated by how he is freaking out. He gets frustrated and angry with her for being a 90 year old woman. I’m fine if he wants to get frustrated and angry at the situation, but it I’m very not fine with him taking out his dysfunction on her. When he isn’t getting angry with her, he talks to her like she is 3 years old. I don’t know how many times over the years we have explained to him that he just needs to speak louder to her, not slower or in simpler sentences.

She has been recovering from a fall that she had while she was last home alone (which is how she had lived prior to about a month ago). She has been at a hospital and was then moved to a short-term nursing home. We are moving her from there into an assisted living facility next weekend. She had a life-alert necklace, but did not use it after she fell. She pulled herself up and went on about her day. She ended up calling a neighbor the next morning when she was so sore from her fall that she could not get out of bed. Why? Because of how my uncle had previously freaked out when she’s used the service, not being able to fathom why she was getting old.

Her placement in a full-time care home has been complicated by the fact that while performing a TB screening chest xray during her fall recovery, they detected a spot on her lung. TB has been ruled out, but any further diagnosis procedures are risky. A needle biopsy could collapse her lung.

She’s decided not to treat the likely cancer. She was not a smoker, but my grandfather was when he was alive. I would probably decide similarly if I were 90 and had asymptomatic lung cancer. Chemo or radiation treatments are not high on my list of things to experience in my twilight years.

The problem is, she has started to just not talk to him when he is at his worst. Or purposefully turn down her hearing aide so she can’t hear him. Everyone else in the family, she is fine with, communicative with, she gets up and visits with people she knows in the short-term nursing home.

He is usually around and talking to grandma when the nursing supervisor is observing her, and the supervisor and my uncle have been discussing the possibilities of some of my grandma’s behavior around him as obstinate and possible signs of dementia. Again, she is just fine around everyone else.

The supervisor had also been curtailing my grandmother’s physical therapy from her fall, where she was regaining her strength to get herself out of bed and walk with her walker. This was also tied to what I feel to be misunderstandings due to social dysfunction on the part of my uncle.

If it were anyone else, I would have no qualms confronting him and saying “You are not helping.” , and explain some alternative perspectives on a few things. But he would not understand.

“What do you mean, I’m not helping?” And the look on his face would be genuine befuddlement.

8

I almost forgot the finance guy…

The guy who manages my grandmother’s investments can’t talk to him either. He makes up stories about having another call, hangs up on my uncle, and then has perfectly productive conversations with my other uncle. They seriously have to tag-team him to help him navigate the paperwork and his responsibilities.

9

What percentage of your grandmother’s time is spent with your uncle versus everyone else in the family? It sounds to me like he goes to see her daily whereas the rest of you live in different towns and only come down for short visits. How often are those visits?

The fact of the matter is that dementia can be covered up for short bursts, and that people that don’t live with elderly relatives are often blind to their decline. If he’s in the room every day, you’ve got to give him the benefit of the doubt–or take two weeks off and go down there and stay with her every day for hours and then see how you feel.

It’s also not uncommon for the elderly to resent the family member that is taking care of them because they are miserable and lonely and they hate beyond words that the child they nursed now knows they can’t wipe their own ass. It’s humiliating for everyone, and you have to cut people slack.

If he’s overwhelmed with responsiblities, the family needs to come together and break things up into zones (financial, day-to-day, etc) and if your grandmother’s of sound mind, the legal things can be revised. But you have to come together on this, you don’t have time to work it out. This is just going to get worse. If you think whether or not to sell the car is a hard choice, you haven’t seen anything. This is not a time to sit back and bitch and wring hands.

10

My two uncles both live within 30 minutes of her house and both have seen and visited her multiple times each week, both when she was living on her own and since she has been in the hospital. My mother visits regularly as well, though less often considering that she lives 6 hours away.

My older uncle is not, in anyway, the only one who is taking an active role in grandma’s life, and he is not, in anyway, functionally fulfilling any greater responsibilities than anyone else. On paper, he is the executor, but he is only succeeding in meeting those responsibilities because of the efforts, planning, and decisions being made by the functional members of the family that are then carefully and repeatedly explained to him over and over. As unexpected things have come up, which they usually do, he is usually about 5 steps behind everyone else in processing and adjusting to any new information.

I’ve voiced my concerns about his abilities to meet any of these responsibilities long before things got to this point. My mom and her other brother seem to have decided that enduring him with the status quo is easier than trying to legally remove him from the equation. I think they are coming to terms with the unfortunate consequences of that decision now. I don’t know my older uncle very well, and that has been on purpose. He’s always struck me as…odd…but I don’t know if he has always been this difficult to interact with and we have all somehow been buffered from that realization because it hasn’t directly impacted any of us until now. Maybe his personality is just exacerbated by his own advancing age. It just seems like a perfect storm of sorts, brewing in the heart of my familial unit. He can’t handle change, and the only way to try and fix some of the mess is to make changes.

I completely agree that dealing with her car is sunshine and flowers compared to things like selling her house, coordinating the picking up of items by the various family members who have worked out with grandma who will take the player piano or the china hutch.

11

There’s something that I’d like to point out here that really been said yet. It sounds like your older uncle may have Asperger’s or some other autism-like disorder. If that’s the case, then his behavior and inability to deal with change is not his fault (it could also explain the three or four divorces). I point this out because it seems like there’s a lot of anger being directed at him and I’m not sure he deserves it. I, too, have my own mental issues and have spent my whole life being called stupid and lazy and all sorts of other nasty things over behaviors and tendencies that I’ve struggled and struggled to control with limited success.

I know it seems like he’s the one who’s dropped the ball when it comes to handling your grandmother’s affairs, but think about it this way: If I were to give a five-year-old the responsibility of, say, doing my taxes for me, and he completely screws it up, whose fault is that? The kid’s, or mine for placing a burden on him that he couldn’t possibly have handled?

It’s not that I think you should start pointing fingers at your ninety-year-old grandmother—finger-pointing isn’t going to do anyone any good at this point, anyway—but being your uncle’s mother and knowing him as well as a mother knows her son, it’s hard for me to understand how she thought this wouldn’t turn into a big mess. Perhaps it just didn’t occur to her to assign certain duties to certain people, as has been suggested, which would have prevented placing the entire burden on one clearly incapable person.

Reading over what I’ve written, I think I may be coming across as overly harsh. I don’t mean to be. I just can’t help feeling sympathy for people who are blamed and derided for their mental illnesses.

Please forgive me if I’ve offended you or misunderstood the situation.

12

I can understand your concern, but isn’t it really their business to initiate a change? Or can they get your mother to make this change?

13

I’ve always just thought of him as “odd”. His own mother and siblings quickly figured out that he was…different, but in his 65 years he has never been diagnosed with anything, other than diabetes. That condition has him in the doctor’s office regularly. His last marriage, that ended almost 10 years ago, and lasted 10 years, was to a very well-respected child psychologist. Of all of the people in his life who could’ve figured out even a subtle mental condition, I would think it would’ve been her and she would’ve said something. She is still quite close to many people in the family, though not to him.

Is there adult onset of Asperger’s and Autism? Most of my life my feelings about him have been more of pity. The anger has been percolating up because I’m very protective of my Mom, my grandmother (and the other uncle that I get along with swimingly) and they’re getting the crappy end of the stick from his unique world view lately.

But, as I said before, he has no idea that he’s behaving any differently than anyone else. He has no empathy for how his actions impact other people. All other things being equal, pity is my first reaction to that. But… he is a 65 year old retiree, who lives in a nice big condo, has a nice fat retirement portfolio. When he’s not playing cribbage he travels to visit with friends, sometimes to various countries here and there. He’s been able to deal with a lot of life in his own way, on his own, and managed to make it through.

My wife and I had a long chat with my Mom last night, providing our unsolicited opinion that things are going to get worse in the situation before they get better. She, my other uncle and my grandmother seem to be resolved to their fate of just having to deal with my uncle. I realize now that it is quite possible that nothing would really change even if grandma tried to re-assign responsibilities. No one is comfortable shutting him out of these decisions. All three of the siblings are already doing everything they can. One of them just can’t do much that is actually productive, but they all already know that.

The biggest risk from his behavior so far, imho, was the negotiations as far as entrance requirements and health clearance needed with the doctors, the short-term nursing home staff, and the long-term assisted living home staff. We almost didn’t get her in to the place she wanted to go because of my uncle being paralyzed by rapid change, miscommunication, and anxiety.

Now that she’s been accepted and we’re moving her in next week, I think we dodged a bullet.

14

I’m not an expert, but no, I don’t there’s such a thing as adult-onset Asperger’s. It was just that some of the “symptoms” you described seemed Asperger-like to me.