Does one owe it to their parents to take care of them in old age?

[7Wannabe5]

Remember to take care of yourself too. You are in a very tough situation. My father whom I loved dearly died very quickly of pneumonia post-lung cancer when he was otherwise still rather young and capable. My mother with whom I had a rocky relationship is just now starting to need assistance due to mobility issues, and I am currently the daughter caring for her, but there is no way I will commit to doing it long-term. I don't know what I would have done if my father had been the one who needed me the way your mother needs you. ((Sclass))

[1taskaday]

My heart goes out to you,you are amazing and so selfless.

I wish I could promise eternal salvation and excellent karma in the next life for all your selflessness in this one,But is that the way it really works?

As a family we have been through a recent bout of this with my Dad,ended up on ventilator in ICU for 4 days.He has recovered well but it is probably the first of many of these health incidents as both my parents are 86 years.

There are 6 daughters in my family,all my sisters being nurses or carers of some fashion,(naturally not me being an INTJ).

I found the whole 2 weeks while he was in hospital totally draining,as somebody needed to be with him all through the daytime.I think I whined the most of all 6 of us...I am ashamed to admit.

I suppose we are lucky as each sister and me took turns and made the burden so much easier for my mom and each other.I can't imagine what it would be like for just one person to carry the load alone like you have to do.
Carers/Hospital staff are fine but so much can fall between the cracks as they are so busy and stretched... and this eats away at you if a family member is not there.

My 2 brothers on the other hand did the "half hour" visiting thing as most male's do...

That is why you are so amazing to take the whole load on yourself.

I made sure that when I married my DH that I kept large boundaries between myself and his parents (under huge criticism and judgment from everyone,even my own family) as often the daughter in law gets the care of her elderly in laws as well as her own parents.

That was one trap I was not falling into,I know "bad wife" etc ...

The care of elderly parents causes so much friction in families,I hear about it constantly at work.
The basic problem always is that you get people who won't pull their weight or do their turn.
I have a theory (that I totally believe),that a lot of middle aged/elderly women often stay working (even though they could afford to retire)because they don't want to become full-time carers (doormats in my opinion) to aging in-laws or grand kids...I think this is so sad,all because they never learned to say NO in life.

Judging the family members who don't share the burden or carrying bitterness about this will only hurt you in the long run,but boy from the sound of your deal it is a large bitter pill to swallow...

I think it is too late now to change the way the caring is set up for your mom,how did you walk yourself into it ...did you not realize in the beginning of this 8 year journey that you were taking on this burden on your own letting everyone else of the hook? I don't mean to sound harsh but the time to start shouting and making noise about this was surely in the beginning.

On the other hand it's often pointless and a complete waste of energy appealing to "deaf ears".

Most people will never step up if someone else is doing it all...I have seen this with child minding and also in the workplace.

Unless you decide to do something drastic like pulling out completely and letting the chips lie where they fall...you are trapped.

The penalty in this life for being kind,responsible,caring and selfless...

[EMJ]

Sorry to hear that you are going through such difficulties. I hope your mother isn't suffering.
Watching someone close slowly lose their mind is is a very challenging.
Take care of yourself.

I am in a similar situation (dementia, sibling who doesn't contribute) but thanks to Scandinavian health care my mother gets excellent care at a fraction of the costs you mention - albeit not in her own home.

[Sclass]

Thanks for the good words. A night of sleep in my own bed and another long nap on the couch this afternoon did wonders. I ate a big pile of flavor king pluots from my local farmer's market for dessert. I feel a lot better. till I need to go to the bathroom.

I walked right into this trap. Greed. A childish need for approval. Love for my mom who acted like a victim all her life while loving her abuser. I'm an idiot.

It's ok. At the end of the day I love my mom and I'm taking care of her. With her money.

Thanks all.

[Did]

@sclass Man that sounds tough. How lucky she is to have you as a son. But as you are no doubt aware, you don't have to ruin your life to look after your mother in her final stages. Deeply personal, but I would put her in a home or get home care at that stage. After all, she wouldn't want you ruining your life. And even if she did, you don't have to. Others aren't.

[Seppia]

Thanks for the good words. A night of sleep in my own bed and another long nap on the couch this afternoon did wonders. I ate a big pile of flavor king pluots from my local farmer's market for dessert. I feel a lot better. till I need to go to the bathroom.

I walked right into this trap. Greed. A childish need for approval. Love for my mom who acted like a victim all her life while loving her abuser. I'm an idiot.

It's ok. At the end of the day I love my mom and I'm taking care of her. With her money.

Thanks all.

You're a great person, big congratulations for what you're doing, it's wonderful to read.
I hope I will have the fortitude to be as good of a son/daughter as you are if it ever comes to that. I think I will but nobody really knows for sure until they're confronted with it.
I admire you a lot, keep kicking ass!

[GandK]

I admire you a lot, keep kicking ass!

Me too. So much respect. Hang in there, @Sclass.

[Sclass]

So good to be home a second day. I got to sleep. I played cards with a buddy in the afternoon. I lost three times and it was great!

My sister did indeed pop in Saturday afternoon. She drove three hours one way to visit. I watched her over webcam trying to feed my mom pudding for ten minutes. It didn't happen. Fifty–five minutes later she hit the door. Gone. Wow. Something is going on there. I'm no psychologist but I'd call that running away. This is the second time in two years she had visited. Good to see what I'm dealing with up close.

"Sclass, the caregiver needs gloves, broth and paper towels," she texted on her way out. I told her where they were stored and she got some for the new help. Not everyone is up to speed because of the new crisis management.

I'm good. Mom sipped liquids slowly yesterday. It's like an old TV that fades in and out. Sometimes you get something.

Regarding ERE stuff I have to say it was really good my folks had put money aside for this. As much as I'm grinding away at this, they are not digging into my retirement funds. Only my retirement time. Be careful what you agree to I guess. People will take all that is available till it is used up. Don't overestimate others' shamelessness. And don't sit around lamenting about it because it is what it is. Have a plan...some kind of plan. Oddly my dad's plan has worked...I just wish I wasn't a major ingredient in the recipe. So many lessons.

Last night I took my SO to a nice dinner. The waiter said our appetizer was special order and it would take 25 minutes. I said great, I would love to sit here with my SO and just do nothing for a change. Perfect! I put my phone away and we relaxed.

[Jason]

No.

[Sclass]

I think it is too late now to change the way the caring is set up for your mom,how did you walk yourself into it ...did you not realize in the beginning of this 8 year journey that you were taking on this burden on your own letting everyone else of the hook? I don't mean to sound harsh but the time to start shouting and making noise about this was surely in the beginning.

On the other hand it's often pointless and a complete waste of energy appealing to "deaf ears".

I keep coming back to this question in my mind. How did I get here. It may have started when I was a small child pulling on my father's leg as he was beating my mom. I'd get a serious beating trying to rescue her. Then she'd hang around my apartment in college and grad school crying about how she caught dad with another woman. I always had this fantasy of rescuing her. But she always seemed to keep the door open for him. He'd come and go between our different homes. They'd act married around me after the divorce.

Ever since I was a small child my dad put me to work on the home(s) and yard(s). I can recall hauling cold roof tar at six, pulling nails from lumber so we could recycle them. Laying fiber glass insulation at six because I was small enough for the crawl space. High school came and I was youngest. Still maintaining the home after older siblings escaped to college a decade earlier. We never really hired help unless it was serious like pumping a septic tank. I learned plumbing, auto mechanics, home electrical, appliance repair etc and kept things going on a shoe string. My dad hoarded the savings for decades and diverted it towards investments.

All along my mom was living half the year a lone. Mom would be living a lone half of the year while dad juggled his wives. She'd call me to come over and fix stuff. I'd show up. It seemed innocent fixing a pipe or patching the roof. But it started a pattern.

After getting my career started I would spend vacations there fixing her place. My siblings seemed to spend vacations in Hawaii but mom would put me on a guilt trip if I'd said I want to go skiing with my two weeks of yearly freedom. I spent most of my vacation time in the 2000s visiting her and fixing her place. I was happy to do it but a part of me felt prideful...driven by a need to be better than my siblings. I'd been told all my life I was intellectually inferior to them and I'd never be as good as them. A weak side of me hung around pounding nails for approval. I think my mom knew she was manipulating me.

Then mom started having little skips in memory a decade ago. We got by a few years without help. I'd stop by and fix stuff. Then I installed a webcam because traveling salesmen were scamming her.

One night I saw my folks walking around the house naked. They were in their 70s. Whoa. My step mother would have had a cow if she saw that. It occurred to me they were still very married. Dad just "visited" as he pleased. All the funds were comingled.

My vacations at her home got scarier as I saw unpaid bills. Old dividend checks.

I started auto pay on the bills and auto deposit on dividends. This was years ago.

Dad showed up and hired an old lover as a caregiver for my mom. He gave me a checkbook and bank account and said you handle this. Things just went downhill from there. More visits. More problems. More caregivers. Less memory. I went from slightly perturbed taking care of little fixes to full out geriatric management. When I said we should sell the home and liquidate paper dad pushed back and told me I didn't have legal say over this stuff. Everything was in his name and there were no DPOA papers because he told mom not to trust me with that decision.

Some relatives and neighbors aware of the situation said I should fight legally for control. But given the choice between me going a long with it and having access to family money to pay the bills I went with my dad. I became his pawn. I did this to myself.

My SO saw it all. We've been hanging around since we were teens. She said she loved me but I was being a pathetic little boy trying to please my parents. She kept explaining the manipulation to me but I tried to ignore her and soldier on.

And things got worse. I managed more. I thought more about how to better handle things. I organized the home care team. I got control of a large pile of assets to bankroll this monstrosity. Somewhere under all the layers of care my mom sat silently drooling. I was consumed with the machine I'd built and intentionally ignored her decline the last few years. I just wanted to stay busy managing the system.

And now we are at late stage dementia. I never bothered to read up on what happens at the end till this month. Pneumonia. No eating. What it is.

So this is kind of how I got here. There are a lot of other side tales of how my business got shuttered, my heart condition and my arrival at early retirement got me this job. But mostly I showed up and other people gladly let me have the job.

As for things falling on deaf ears, right, I realized asking for help would at most make things worse or at least nothing would happen. After seeing my sister walk in the house, take a look, then walk out recently I realize it is nothing would happen. It was always a waste of time to ask for help.

Even now nobody is helping. I'm basically hiring "friends" for $14,000 a month at deal with it.

I called her doctor and I feel he's given up. He's smart and probably seen this before. If he just stalls and changes the focus he'll have less headache. My siblings are similar. And even my dad has stepped back. I'm just starting to get the idea.

I've been in situations like this before. Once during my career I was a big crisis fighter. I was quick to pick up the ball and start running. One of my reports said I was an idiot for always picking up the ball. Everyone dropped it in front of me. He said just play dumb and don't pick it up. Nobody picked it up. We all just did nothing. I waited for somebody else to pick it up and eventually the department imploded. I found myself in the CEOs office with him yelling at me "WTF happened to the old Sclass!? Where is he?"

I'm just going to take big bundles of cash and burn them to stay warm. It cannot be long now. I'm almost done.

[Ego]

Thank you for your brutal honesty.

Highly manipulative people like your father are good at anticipating (or manufacturing) a crisis. They are good at gaming out their moves to use the crisis to control others. That's why manipulators always seem to be in the center of one crisis or another. They are good at guessing your desires in a given situation and are good at anticipating those things that you simply cannot allow to occur. That's how they go for the jugular.

Crises can make us feel like we need to make decisions (and commitments) on the spot. Pick up the ball and run with it, right then and there. Solve the problem NOW!

We made a pact long ago that when faced with situations like these, we would stop and tell whoever was communicating the crisis that we need time to think. We actually practiced the response we would give if they demanded action on the spot. "If you require an answer at this moment, then the answer is NO. Let me think about it and talk it over with X and I will let you know."

I'm just going to take big bundles of cash and burn them to stay warm. It cannot be long now. I'm almost done.

None of that helps you. As you said, you are almost done. Keep in mind that every ending is also a beginning.

[Sclass]

Wow Ego, good to hear from you. I thought you'd ridden your bike to the jungles of Central America and never returned.

What I meant about burning the money is I'm spending it on layers of insulation (I'm using an agency to handle the care) to separate myself from this. It has allowed me to step back and get some peace. I don't really need mom's money if she's gone. I have always had enough of my own to survive well.

That's all I meant. I've been fighting for years to keep expenses low at mom's. It takes work and management. The efficiency kind of came at my expense. I didn't really know how long things would last so I never opened up the money spigots. I'm feel I'm close enough to done that I can just be dumb. You know, the less you know the more you pay. I need to save myself psychologically.

Another day. Time to live.

[Dragline]

I shed tears over your post, Sclass. I'm very sorry for all that you have been through and continue to experience.

Both of your parents had low empathy characteristics -- a narcissist and a borderline. It's not your fault.

Wish I could hug you, man.

[halfmoon]

Sclass, are you able to talk with your mother in lucid moments? If so: can you ask her if she wants to live? She may feel trapped. Maybe she really doesn't want to eat the damn pudding.

Have you looked into hospice care?

[Chad]

That is rough Sclass. I know how hard it was taking care of my mom for the roughly two years she fought brain cancer, and my entire family (4) was helping.

It sounds like not EREing her current care is the right choice for you. You can't let all of the bad stuff take away your life too. Good luck man.

[Sclass]

Sclass, are you able to talk with your mother in lucid moments? If so: can you ask her if she wants to live? She may feel trapped. Maybe she really doesn't want to eat the damn pudding.

Have you looked into hospice care?

Hi, yes I have. SO has proposed we do this. I'm on the fence. I may not have to make that decision soon.

[7Wannabe5]

Based on my own experience, I think integrating some hospice care professionals into the mix at this juncture would be a very good idea. Their experience and objectivity will be of great value. My father died at home with hospice involvement and they were wonderful, because they are also experts on counseling and interacting with people experiencing grief. Unlike most mere mortals, they will know the right thing to say and the least worst choice to make in these circumstances.

[saving-10-years]

@sclass wish I could hug you too. I understand the whole my-parent-relies-on-me thing that you have been through for since childhood (not just the past 8 years) and admire that you don't resent that more. I've had experience of that looking-at-things-differently-with-hindsight but feeling like it was the right thing to do at the time. You have a great attitude to all of this but the part of your recent story that I have loved most is where you finally found a way to spend time with your SO (continue to find that time), and the watching of your mother's visitors on the webcam. That was useful insider knowledge!

This is the final stage and you know what state your Mum is in (lucidity and health) better than anyone else. More than the people who are not there now and haven't been there much at all along the way. Enjoy what you can of your mother and don't stress about what others think and do here. You thankfully have control and resources to not have to rely on them. And listen to your SO, she sounds pretty clear sighted.

[SavingWithBabies]

@Sclass Wow... That is really rough. Thank you for sharing your experience with us.

My answer to the question is yes. I don't know how it will all shake out but my wife is the eldest sibling on her side and my brother is the eldest on my side. We expect to care for my wife's parents. My brother may care for my parents or it may fall to us too. For both, my yes is conditional on that meaning that if we are taking care of them, it is on our terms to some degree. But I think reading Sclass's experience makes it clear that there are a lot of potential issues.

But my answer is yes.

[Riggerjack]

Sclass, thank you for sharing, the story you told should be spoken of more, there is lots to learn here.

I'm not a hugger, but if I could, I would.

What I can do is overanalyze the situation from too little information. We each have our strengths... wish I could just write this down and send it to you next year, but then I would never get it done. So here's my best advice, poorly timed:

I think you are smart and capable. That you habitually solve difficult problems, and you like it. But the downside to this is you take on too much responsibility, without insisting on taking authority at the same time. I see this in the corporate world all the time.

In this case, you had time and skills, and your father used them. No need to get worked up about it. It was the smart play in his book. Take a problem, (your mom) add a solution (you) add money, and move on to other issues. I assume he had other things to deal with, in all this time.

But this was a problem for you, in that you wanted things that weren't even on the table. You wanted respect from parents and siblings. Validation of your life choices, etc. These are not things you get from handling a long, emotionally exhausting problem nobody wants to deal with.

You get these things by insisting on them, up front.

Before you accept responsibility, you need to wait until authority is given. It NEVER works the other way.

If you had waited until your mom was more of a problem for your dad, and insisted on full support from father and siblings up front, and continually through the years, this could have gone easier for you, and be less awkward for them.

This ain't easy. It goes against all the lessons we learned in kindergarten.

You seem to be waiting for your family to embrace your choices and decisions. To realize that you were right all along. To change their ways, and accept what you have to teach them. This must be incredibly frustrating.

Because it ain't gonna happen. If the S&P 500 zeroed out tomorrow, the sky fell, and the earth cracked, and you were all hunched together around a camp fire, while you repaired shoes, they wouldn't think how great it was that you learned to do that while they went to Disneyland. They would be thinking about how to get to Disneyland from there.

There is a fundamental disconnect in goals and communication between you and your family, and it goes both ways. I'm guessing that if pressed, your communication, and confrontation habits probably are more in line with your mom, and theirs is more in line with your father's. (Me too, initially) learning to bridge that gap is going to fall on you, not because you need it more, but because you have the time to achieve this goal. They have jobs and kids and minor crisis after minor crisis. If you wait, you will need your own elder care before they get it together.

None of this helps you now, and I'm sorry about that. But if all goes well, you have decades more, with these people in your life. Learning to communicate effectively with them may help you.

On the other hand, I also have communication problems with my family. And I decided it wasn't worth the time and effort to fix it. This is also a viable option, but it takes those things you want from your family right off the table.

When this crisis is over, and the decompression is complete, I recommend you spend some time really getting to know your father and siblings. As independent adults, not seen through the lens of who/what you want them to be, but as they are. Then decide how much effort they are worth to you.

If they are worth it, learn to speak their language. If not, find people who are.