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[quote=Anonymous]My mother is dealing with her father's declining health, traveling back and forth from her state to his.

Now I'm trying to figure out how to deal with my mother's declining mental health as well as her desperate financial situation. She has Asperger's Syndrome and is pretty continuously depressed, is reclusive, doesn't have close connections in the tiny dead-end town she lives in, and is unemployed. Both of her kids are now grown, married with kids or with kids on the way, and living out of state in new and shaky job situations. What we can actually do for her is pretty limited, and she'll resist cooperating with what we can offer her--she fears change in general, and specifically the idea of moving out of her town. She has been her father's dependent for most of her adult life, and now it's clear that the burden of caring for her is about to shift to me (my sibling lives half a continent away and has a more rigid job and family situation). So here are some of the questions I have.

-Have you had to juggle caring for kids and parents in a situation where the parents are long-distance? 
-What are the changes you ended up making to your lifestyle? 
-When money is tight, what tactics are still available? For instance, it's not likely that we could give up our jobs here and relocate to be with her, or that we could afford the additional space for her to move in with us.
-Was there any particular kind of emotional support that you found successful in trying to prop up your aging parents? 
-What were the best resources you had to keep yourself from going cuckoo?[/quote]

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