Reply to Did disagreement over elder care cause a permanent rift among your siblings?

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[quote=Anonymous]I'm grateful for this discussion, since I'm going through this with my three siblings. 
I like the idea of having discrete jobs that each sibling could take care of--eases resentment. But I'm not sure what my job is/should be. The discussions with two of my siblings have been so ugly that I've already decided that I don't want to have much or any contact with them not just after Mom and Dad die, but even now.

I'm the child who lives locally. Mom and Dad, both in their 90s, are fairly independent, living in their own house, and I visit on weekends. I occasionally go with them to doctor's appointments, at my sister's insistence. Dad has long COVID and so there's a nurse to help with toileting, but my parents dislike having someone in the house, and they've already dismissed the nurses on weekends (so Mom is the unpaid nurse on weekends, which she does not enjoy, but if they don't want a nurse, what's the alternative?)

My more distant siblings --they're all in California--want mom and dad in assisted living, both for my parents' safety and because the siblings want to sell the huge house we grew up in. It will be a nightmare to go through the house and will take months. We've tried to do one room and Mom and Dad don't want to part with anything. They are candidates for Hoarders. It's their house and their things and I think they regard going through their mess/clutter as a step towards dying. Mom says, "You will hate me, but I don't want to part with any of it." We laugh. There is nothing of value except the family photo albums which mysteriously went missing after my sister visited.

I just don't see eye-to-eye with my siblings about anything. They think I'm detached--I go shopping for mom and dad and do anything else they ask, but with a full-time job and a teenager I don't look for things to do. On Thanksgiving I was going to visit friends, which I do every year, but siblings say this might be the last Thanksgiving with my parents, so I should spend it with them. I don't want to...Siblings might come, might not. Mom and Dad could live another five years, easily. Their parents lived to over 100. Maybe I'm the one that everyone resents for "not doing anything," but I don't understand what I'm expected to do.   
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