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[quote=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?[/quote]

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