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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]No, he wants his wife.  I’m a widow, I get it.  Check yourself.[/quote]

+1.  He spent decades with his wife, and now he has dementia and misses her.  Sounds pretty normal to me.  Weird flex on your part, op.  [/quote]

My FIL with dementia is like this too. He doesn’t remember how horrible he was to her. [/quote]

They don't realize they were horrible. That's why they don't remember. Also if they realize that they were horrible, it would cause a lot of grief, so their brains sort of protect them from that realization, especially as they get older.

My sister forced my mom to confront some of her awful parenting in her 70s and honestly I wish she hadn't. My mom couldn't handle it and it just made it that much harder. At some point you have to accept a person did what they did and let it go because they are too old to be held accountable. Your FIL cannot make up for the way he treated his wife now. I'm okay with people deciding not to care for elderly people who were abusive to them or their loved ones, but I don't see the point in trying to punish them at this age. Either care for them and let it go, or let someone else care for them and move on with your life. You are not going to extract a satisfying penance from an elderly person with dementia. You just aren't.[/quote]

My oldest BIL, who bore the brunt of my MIL's first experience at parenting (she improved with her subsequent kids) has done a lot of this. My MIL is not in dementia, though, although with Parkinson's she gets very tired and emotional. Honestly, I can see both sides. He doesn't shout or anything, he just points out the traumatic events from his childhood that he still remembers, all these years later. She cannot acknowledge them as being traumatic, even though objectively, they were. I had it out with my mother when I was 30 and she was 60. He carried the trauma much longer, and at some point it had to get out.

There is no statute of limitations to childhood trauma. Parents need to realize that children are not little adults, and cannot process abuse or neglect with the same maturity as adults. If you traumatize them, and they remember you did that, it's fair that at some point you're going to blowback. My oldest BIL is also the one who is most often available to take care of my MIL, drive her to appointments, sit with her. He even bought her a house, because she didn't like her apartment. So it's not like he doesn't love and care for her. They have their own dynamic. We don't interfere.[/quote]

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