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[quote=Anonymous]Is she cognitively decent-normal memory loss and not dementia? If so, she gets free will including making terrible choices.

I know you are stressed and I have been in her shoes x100, but you are also pathologizing some things that aren't a big deal. Plenty of people don't like it when someone just stops by their home without calling first. She may be more introverted and with age it becomes more pronounced, but she does see people so she certainly isn't isolated.

You seem very concerned people will think you are are bad daughter and you call yourself "selfish" maybe because you've been manipulated with that word before or because you are afraid people will call you that so you use first. You care, you want to do the right thing, but you have to respect her crazy wishes if she is not cognitively impaired enough to be deemed incompetent.

You can also have boundaries. If she dies because she refused to check out a health issue, she died on her terms. I had to learn to accept that myself. Having been through this for over a decade with parents/inlaws I am not sure doing backflips to keep them alive against their will at the expense of your own health is the better option.

I can tell you what the end of life looked like for one of my parents after we dealt with constant emergencies and convincing him to take him meds, and running ourselves ragged. He could not walk, talk, feed himself or obviously use the bathroom and he was moaning despite having good pain meds. AND...my mother tried to refuse hospice so he could just be miserable eternally because she convinced herself it was the right think in case there was a chance of a miracle. Prior to all that his decline was misery for him for years.

The question becomes if you want to throw around selfish, is it selfish to push someone to live a life of misery for many years or selfish to allow them to die much younger on their own terms.[/quote]

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