Reply to Excessively dependent mother still completely helpless months after dad's death

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[quote=Anonymous]I am so sorry to be so late to the party but do have a couple of quick comments for OP.

First, let me say how much I can empathize with you.  My 93 yo father died 2 months ago today.  Fortunately, in our case, my father was the one that needed a ton of help and most of that was provided by my 87 yo mother, who is the capable one and who is adapting, slowly.  Additionally we lost my 87 yo MIL last fall, so my children have lost 2 of their 3 grandparents in under a year and it's been hard on them.  The reason I wasn't around for the beginning of your thread is that my 66 yo BIL had been visiting us and several weeks ago, I had to take him to the ER where he was diagnosed with pneumonia, which in turn, caused his heart condition (which had been stable for about 6 years) to recur again.  We had gotten him out of the hospital and into a rehab center and Sunday morning, the pneumonia returned and we had to take him back to the hospital.  It is likely that we'll need to investigate AL for him in the near future.  So I definitely understand what you are going through.

As experience with my BIL, who has Medicare provided living assistance, when you revisit the idea of a PT caretaker to come and help you mother, you might find that 3 hours per day, 5 days a week, will work better than 4 hours every other day.  My BIL has found that he doesn't need quite as much help on a daily basis, but he does need a little bit of help every day. In fact, he often has difficulty making sure to have 3 hours of work for her, but he does have between 1-2 hours of work for her each day.  He would rather have 2 hours, 7 days a week, rather than 3 hours 5 days a week (14 hours vs 15 hours), but Medicare will only pay for a minimum of 3 hours, so he lives with the arrangements.

From the experience of my father, who had a stroke before he passed, we found out that seniors with deteriorating mental capacities (whether Alzheimers and related diseases, or just decreased mental accuity from age), tend to lose skills in reverse order from learning them.  In general things that you've known longer are more ingrained into your neural pathways.  In my father's case, he had learned multiple languages, the dialect where he was born (childhood), then the the general language he spoke while growing up (middle school through college) and then English (college and beyond).  The doctors told us that what we didn't realize was that my father had had several mini-strokes before the big stroke that ultimately took his life.  We hadn't realized it because he was pretty strong and he powered through the smaller ones, but the CT scan definitely showed areas of his brain that had been cut off and had died before the massive stroke.  And the one sign that we hadn't noticed in the weeks before the stroke was that he was losing his language skills.  He was speaking less and less English and then less and less of his "main language" and reverting more often to his childhood dialect.  We thought he was just aging, but the doctor said that this was common that he was losing the languages in the reverse order from learning them.  And we didn't think about the order he learned them, since he a young man when he learned English, well before he met our mother and had us, so we just thought of him as trilingual.  But in retrospect, that was one of the signs of the stroke.  The point of this is that even if you were to find someone to teach your mother new skills including using the TV remote and putting out the trash, etc, as your mother continues to age, it is likely that the things that she is most likely to forget how to do are the things you are trying to teach her to do to maintain some personal care for herself.  So, if she is experiencing decreased memory, the short term memory will go first and the longer-term memories, including being taken care of as the norm, will stick.  She may not really be able to learn to do these basic things for herself at this late stage in her life.  She may be able to learn them, but in a matter of days/weeks, she would likely forget them again and have to be shown/taught again.  So planning for things such as a Google Home to help her would be much more worthwhile than having someone try to teach her.

In the short term, talk to the director.  If there is someone who your mother has started to socialize even briefly with, who is a little more capable, see if you can approach this person or their family member and see if they can take your mother under their wing a bit.  If so, then do something nice, like subscribe to a magazine for them or pay for a cable channel or something that would appeal.  My sister-in-law mentioned that when her parents were first moved into an AL place and they were having problems adjusting they found a friend who helped them acclimate.  My SIL said that she communicated with this woman's son who helped her select a magazine that his mother enjoyed.  My SIL purchased an ongoing subscription for the woman as a thank you for helping her parents adjust to the AL facility.  He said she probably enjoyed helping them anyway (she had taken care of her husband until his death) and the magazine was a nice perk for her, sort of like a treat.  My SIL said that even after they became acclimated to the AL facility, she continued providing the magazine until the friend's death (she died between SIL's father and mother's own deaths) and they remained good friends until their respective passings.  Sometimes just having someone to encourage you is all it takes to get used to a new environment.

Good luck.  I hope things get easier on you![/quote]

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