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

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote: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.

PP here. Then it sounds like you've done everything you can. Something will have to bring this to a head that will get through to her. If the events you have described haven't convinced her of that, I'm not sure if anything else will other than something drastic. The only other thing I can think of is trying another med adjustment to bring his rage down.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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.

PP again. I have gotten great advice on this forum regarding how to view situations like this. The elderly parent has their own agency, and it is their choice how they leave this world. If they want to take risks or refuse help, that is their choice. It may kill or cripple them in the process but that is their choice. All you can do is be what support you can be but also protect your own mental health in the process and keep your distance in what you can.

[Anonymous]

PP again. I have gotten great advice on this forum regarding how to view situations like this. The elderly parent has their own agency, and it is their choice how they leave this world. If they want to take risks or refuse help, that is their choice. It may kill or cripple them in the process but that is their choice. All you can do is be what support you can be but also protect your own mental health in the process and keep your distance in what you can.

[Anonymous]

Hospital/Social Worker/Doctors need to insist that he *not* be released Home. He needs a facility. They need to help, and are expected to help find him care.

Then, what you Mother does, where your Mother lives is next step. Get him placed first.

[Anonymous]

Start therapeutic lying to your dad. Change the passwords to the accounts and when he tries to get in —“OMG, something is wrong. Let me look into it”. A few days later, he brings it up, you say “Dad, you already paid that.”
Checkbooks can get “lost”. Credit cards can get “stolen”. Companies can “force” you to use automatic bill pay and e-bills. You tell them what they need to hear to keep them calm while doing what needs to be done to keep them, the family, and finances safe.
He looks like an adult. But he no longer has the brain of an adult. He no longer has the ability to do proper risk assessments or make good logical decisions. But he will never acknowledge this because you need a fully functioning brain to be able to do an assessment of your own brain.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:PP again. I have gotten great advice on this forum regarding how to view situations like this. The elderly parent has their own agency, and it is their choice how they leave this world. If they want to take risks or refuse help, that is their choice. It may kill or cripple them in the process but that is their choice. All you can do is be what support you can be but also protect your own mental health in the process and keep your distance in what you can.

You forget the trauma inflicted by these behaviors on the person living with him. He can get into an accident and then who picks up the pieces? His wife. He can into rages and who is psychologically and verbally abused? His wife.

Something needs to be done if she cannot deal with this to the point that she's paralyzed and refusing suggestions.

OP needs to take matters into her own hands, or at least try to separate the two parents.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote: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.

I am sorry you are going through this OP. Disappointing response from the priest. But the truth is that you've been told to butt out by pretty much everyone that can do something about this situation. I kind of agree with the post comparing this to domestic abuse, so that's one way you can approach this.

Another approach would be to go there after one of these crises and you and your sister get your mother alone and directly confront her.

Or you can force yourself not to make suggestions and visit as much as you can.

This just sounds like a truly terrible situation.

[Anonymous]

Are there things not related to caring for your dad that you can take over for your mom? Anything you can hire done or pay for from a distance? Yardwork, grocery delivery, housecleaning, etc.? If she won't take help related to him, maybe she'll accept help on other things (perhaps framed as "to allow you to be able to focus on helping Dad)?

[Anonymous]

It is time to have your father to go somewhere “temporarily “. If he is hospitalized again, tell them that he cannot go home as your mother in incapable to taking care of him.

When my ILs were facing something similar, they moved “temporarily “ into an assisted living center when FIL needed surgery for cancer. They never moved home.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:PP again. I have gotten great advice on this forum regarding how to view situations like this. The elderly parent has their own agency, and it is their choice how they leave this world. If they want to take risks or refuse help, that is their choice. It may kill or cripple them in the process but that is their choice. All you can do is be what support you can be but also protect your own mental health in the process and keep your distance in what you can.

+1,000,000 OP I could have written your post about 5 years ago. Instead of a priest, we got a case worker involved who gave the same response because mom held it together for the case worker and went bananas with me over dealing with dad. I tried to explain how she in our case vacillated between crying and rage dealing with dad, but what they saw was someone worn out, but holding it together well and I was the bad guy for butting in. You have to step back and let me tell it didn't go well. He declined more and she waited way too long to get the proper help. She never recovered from the ordeal and has remained a rage filled, spiteful person beyond burnout who refuses to stay in therapy or stay on medication. Nobody believed how she lashed out at me once he was gone except for my children and husband who witnessed it. It's all very sad. I have needed to let the professionals deal and step back which means she is now declining and not in the right setting. I can endure rage fit after rage fit to somehow miraculously get her all the right help.

It is so frustrating when people like priests make you feel like you are crazy and the parent is doing just fine in a difficult situation. It can feel like all your efforts to help get shot down, so you have to step back. Have your boundaries. Take care of yourself and do what you handle without losing your mind. She may lose hers, but if she is cognitively capable, it's her choice. I wish I could have saved my mom from basically going insane from the stress, but I could not because she fought me tooth and nail. I suspect she is now at a pre-dementia stage where she still appears fine to the professionals, but is declining, but I cannot do myself in trying to convince people she has lost it and needs more help.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Are there things not related to caring for your dad that you can take over for your mom? Anything you can hire done or pay for from a distance? Yardwork, grocery delivery, housecleaning, etc.? If she won't take help related to him, maybe she'll accept help on other things (perhaps framed as "to allow you to be able to focus on helping Dad)?

We actually had more success with the opposite approach. After spending years trying to support our mom, talking with her, researching, offering to do different things, all to have her pretend to go along with it and then at the end say "Well, I'm not going to do that yet." we'd all had enough. My dad was to the point where he had no idea who we were and shouldn't be left alone at all, yet my mom repeatedly refused to get more help or enroll him in a care facility. I have no idea why she was so stubborn; they had a terrible marriage and she didn't even like him. All the conversations with her about it just ended up feeling really phony and manipulative; like she'd have us spend hours researching and talking about things she had no intention of doing. We all finally said "Fine, do what you want, but we aren't visiting anymore." She couldn't travel and leave him, and he wasn't even capable of making an outing to the store at that point, much less make a plane ride, so she was stuck at home with him. She complained but we just kept saying "Dad needs more help and when you finally get it for him, you will be better off, too."

It took like 2 more years, but she finally relented and enrolled him. It was a great place and he stayed there until he died.

OP, unless you are going to call adult protective services and go to court to try and take over your dad's care, there isn't really anything you can do to convince your mother. It might just have to get unbearably bad for her to be willing to make a change. If she hasn't looked already, you might want to research what kind of programs would be available for your dad so that if she does become ready (or she becomes incapacitated) you can move quickly to get him admitted.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:PP again. I have gotten great advice on this forum regarding how to view situations like this. The elderly parent has their own agency, and it is their choice how they leave this world. If they want to take risks or refuse help, that is their choice. It may kill or cripple them in the process but that is their choice. All you can do is be what support you can be but also protect your own mental health in the process and keep your distance in what you can.

+1,000,000 OP I could have written your post about 5 years ago. Instead of a priest, we got a case worker involved who gave the same response because mom held it together for the case worker and went bananas with me over dealing with dad. I tried to explain how she in our case vacillated between crying and rage dealing with dad, but what they saw was someone worn out, but holding it together well and I was the bad guy for butting in. You have to step back and let me tell it didn't go well. He declined more and she waited way too long to get the proper help. She never recovered from the ordeal and has remained a rage filled, spiteful person beyond burnout who refuses to stay in therapy or stay on medication. Nobody believed how she lashed out at me once he was gone except for my children and husband who witnessed it. It's all very sad. I have needed to let the professionals deal and step back which means she is now declining and not in the right setting. I can endure rage fit after rage fit to somehow miraculously get her all the right help.

It is so frustrating when people like priests make you feel like you are crazy and the parent is doing just fine in a difficult situation. It can feel like all your efforts to help get shot down, so you have to step back. Have your boundaries. Take care of yourself and do what you handle without losing your mind. She may lose hers, but if she is cognitively capable, it's her choice. I wish I could have saved my mom from basically going insane from the stress, but I could not because she fought me tooth and nail. I suspect she is now at a pre-dementia stage where she still appears fine to the professionals, but is declining, but I cannot do myself in trying to convince people she has lost it and needs more help.

Only way I got people to believe me was installing cameras in their house and recording what was happening. Then showed it to doctors, social workers, etc.

[Anonymous]

You need to accept that these are her decisions to make and the situation is has a thousand nuances, not all of which you’re privy to since you’re not there day to day. She’s probably estranging herself from you and others because she’s feeling judged. The best thing you can do to support her is lend and ear and just listen and commiserate without giving advice. Seems clear she doesn’t find advice helpful; if you’re able to, please try to stop giving advice and your relationship may improve.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You need to accept that these are her decisions to make and the situation is has a thousand nuances, not all of which you’re privy to since you’re not there day to day. She’s probably estranging herself from you and others because she’s feeling judged. The best thing you can do to support her is lend and ear and just listen and commiserate without giving advice. Seems clear she doesn’t find advice helpful; if you’re able to, please try to stop giving advice and your relationship may improve.

NP. That works and is fine, up until the point where she becomes abusive. If she is using other people as her verbal or literal punching bag, then no, OP does NOT "need to accept" or just listen. At that point, it becomes her responsibility, and she needs to take responsibility for that. She won't let people help. They don't have to be abused by her.

Once she takes responsibility for her own actions again, things can move forward.

[Anonymous]

There’s literally nothing more you can do. I’m sorry.