Father with MANY issues, mother is completely overwhelmed yet refusing help- what to do?

[Anonymous]

My 78 year old dad has rapidly progressing dementia, which my mother has only admitted to in the last year. He's a recovering alcoholic and has an eating disorder, plus lots of trauma and mental health issues from a dysfunctional childhood. He's always been a difficult man, but the dementia has brought out a terrible side of him. He blames my mother for controlling his life and taking away his freedom, and the dementia has robbed him of understanding why she has taken the keys away and is now controlling their bank accounts. Every day, he badgers her incessantly with apoplectic rages and curses her out. Whenever he gets mad, he leaves the house and my mom has no way to track him.

Recently he was hospitalized for a week for threatening to kill himself; unfortunately, 3 days after release, he was back to his old issues. Last weekend he called me raging about his life and again threatened to kill himself. My mom is completely overwhelmed and under a massive amount of stress herself (did I mention she recently had a procedure to remove carcinoma?).

The problem is that she absolutely refuses to listen to anyone who tries to help or offer suggestions for how she can get respite. She has started estranging herself from her sister, with whom she's very close, and from my sister and me. In one breath she's crying telling us about her breakdown in a store, but literally the next sentence is how she'll be ok and will offer up her suffering to God. She doesn't want to hire anyone at the moment because she thinks he's such a unique unpleasant person that people won't know how to handle. After last weekend, she promised she'd take him back to the hospital to deal with the suicide threats, but the next day changed her mind and said she won't.

My sister and I are besides ourselves. They're a day's drive from here so we're dealing with this long distance. It's very clear our father's dementia will take her down with him, if it doesn't do her in first. But we also understand we are not his spouse, nor his caregiver.

How have people dealt with similar situations?

[Anonymous]

I would try to get him on an anti-anxiety med. But the bottom line is your mother is an adult and can make her own choices.

[Anonymous]

So she has dementia too?

You need to get your father into a nursing home, then see if your mother stabilizes, or whether she needs to go into a home as well.

[Anonymous]

There are medications they could try to stabilize him. Do you think he'd take meds from her?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I would try to get him on an anti-anxiety med. But the bottom line is your mother is an adult and can make her own choices.

OP here. He is on meds- I believe both anti-anxiety and depression, and possibly others.

We keep telling ourselves that she is making a choice- the choice to not get help. But's really hard knowing that a difficult situation didn't have to be made worse.

[Anonymous]

I'm so sorry. I gave up fighting my caretaker parent. Every communication became about me wanting to get them more help and her refusing. It was so frustrating. I did communicate with the church office and they started a meal train to help her a couple times a week. Eventually dad got bad enough to qualify for a visiting nurse, but that was only a few hours a week. Hospice upped that up to 10. I might have fought harder to get him to a nursing home if he didn't have a terminal condition, in other words, if there wasn't an end in sight. Still he outlived his prognosis by about a year.

For another relative with dementia, meds were a lifesaver for both them and their caretakers. Otherwise the patient was just too distressed.

I'm sorry it's a horrible pace to be.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So she has dementia too?

You need to get your father into a nursing home, then see if your mother stabilizes, or whether she needs to go into a home as well.

OP here. She hasn't been diagnosed with dementia, but she clearly isn't thinking straight. I assume it's the stress, but to be perfectly honest, I've wondered if the skin cancer has metastasized to her brain.

[Anonymous]

Pp adding that communicating with the church was helpful for more than the meals. If the pastor told my mom to get help, it carried more weight than just me "nagging."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There are medications they could try to stabilize him. Do you think he'd take meds from her?

OP here. He's on meds already and has been for some time. The hospital stay revamped some of the meds, and we'd hoped that this would be the answer, but it's clear that things are right back to where they were. We've been urging her to take him back to the hospital or doctor and she isn't. So the good news is that he does take meds, though complains, but the bad news is that they're not working.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So she has dementia too?

You need to get your father into a nursing home, then see if your mother stabilizes, or whether she needs to go into a home as well.

OP here. She hasn't been diagnosed with dementia, but she clearly isn't thinking straight. I assume it's the stress, but to be perfectly honest, I've wondered if the skin cancer has metastasized to her brain.

She's not able to care for her husband, OP. He need to be placed somewhere, in a Medicare home if funds are insufficient. Get on that, because it takes some time, and in the meantime, everything will come to a head.

[Anonymous]

At minumum, can you get your father to wear an AirTag bracelet so she can find him if wanders off?

[Anonymous]

OP, I'm in a similar situation and feel your pain. I've found there isn't much I can do - I can't forcibly move a parent into assisted living, and it's really upsetting to hear my mom cry every time I call (in my case the genders are reversed). For my own mental health, I have forced myself to step back - my dad has all of my suggestions, I talk to them regularly and always pick up the phone when they call, but I'm not going to nag - my dad needs to want to make a change. I figure there will be some precipitating event that forces the issue. I did, however, get an AirTag and had him drop it in my mom's purse - if there is something your dad takes with him when he leaves, you might want to try this. I also subscribed them to a meal delivery service. So, even though I can't solve the big problem, I can solve some small ones.

[Anonymous]

My Dad down played my Mom’s anger and paranoia from dementia until it was overwhelming him and affecting his health. Turns out he has battered spouse syndrome. You almost have to approach this like she is a DV victim.

It finally forced his hand to sell their house and move to a CCRC near me.

Try to find an adult dementia day care in her area so she can get a bit of a break.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Pp adding that communicating with the church was helpful for more than the meals. If the pastor told my mom to get help, it carried more weight than just me "nagging."

This OP. She's hearing you as white noise. It's not overriding her feeling of responsibility in taking care of him. Getting someone else who she sees as a trusted authority to discuss this situation is key. His/her doctors, their minister, etc.

See if you can visit during his/her next doc appointments and somehow let the docs know what is happening in the home, the affect it is having on her. Or you do one and your sister do the other. The doctors may have more luck in convincing your mom that something needs to be done or this will escalate into something bad happening. His condition has progressed to needing professional full-time help at a memory care facility, more trained than she can provide. She can still see him every day.

[Anonymous]

OP here.

The doctors and her priest are aware. In fact, the geriatrician was the one who was there when my dad got enraged when the doctor told him it was time to turn over his bank accounts to someone else and he stormed out of the office onto a busy street. That doctor and my mom went chasing after him, and he told her she needed to take Dad to the ER for a psychiatric eval.

Out of desperation I wrote to her priest figuring she would listen to him. His response (verbatim):
“From what I know, your mother does not seem to be in denial. Rather, as a committed spouse she appears to be doing everything she can to help your dad retain some sense of routine while recognizing the challenges that are significant. Your mother and I speak frequently. We here are doing what we can to be of support to both of them.”

We’ve suggested an AirTag and she refuses to get an iPhone. On the occasion he takes his phone with him, I can track him. The problem is that he’s lucid enough to realize he has issues and has always been scared of dementia. His mother lived with it till she was 102. There are questions whether a facility would take him with his aggression issues.

Literally every suggestion we’ve made has been met with an excuse or reason not to. There’s a dementia advocate whom one of her friends used and we’ve urged her to meet with this woman. She absolutely refuses and said she feels repulsed by the suggestion. Why, I don’t know.