Apologies. I gotta trauma dump. Spoilered.
My mom is a 74 year old alcoholic who has, progressively over the last 7 or so years, lost her ability to care for herself. Multiple times in these years she's let her home fall into such squalor no one can spend time with her there. I live in the same city as her. My brother lives 5 hours away. About the same for her sister. We're all she has left but she has burned bridges left and right by just being a generally nasty, unpleasant person half the time. She has her good moments and bad but she's a self-pitying, bitter woman who retired from her well respected position in anger and an inability to let personal grievances go. She fell into hardcore drinking, hit rock bottom, was hospitalized and went on to rehab. I cleaned her house, took care of her animals and fixed all the financial and legal things she'd let slip in her drunken depression.
She stayed sober for about a month and then went right back to it. She started losing her mobility at this point, becoming frailer and frailer. The falls started. Her home maintenance fell into true decline as she stopped being able to take care of mostly anything. At this point I started to really detach emotionally from the home and her, and pets I loved but had to leave behind because I couldn't take them with me, and I figured were the only positive things in her life. Eventually she had a fall that broke her leg and she had to be hospitalized, again. By now her home was officially a disaster area. It's a special kind of hell to see carpet you'd gotten on your hands and knees to scrub the dried cat piss out of now soaked with trash juice. My mother single-handedly traumatized me into being a cleaner person.
She's not rich but she didn't do too bad, so she has money. So while she recovered and rehabbed her leg, I contracted a restoration company to fumigate the house, clean it, box up all her stuff and replace the carpets. To the tune of probably $14k of her money. All so she could have a place to come back to and make a real chance at change. And in true mother form, after she was back in the house, she tried to argue with the restoration company and refused to pay them until they eventually emailed me asking me to intervene. She was mad that I even had them do it, that I had them box up half of her stuff which she knew she'd never dig out again. I did it because I anticipated that one day I'd probably be going through this again and decided to get things organized for my own sake when the day came.
Within a few months the house was starting to get trashed again. I vowed never to go over there again. She self-hospitalized at least once that I know of (the neighbors called me to tell me EMS had pulled up to her house.) She claimed it was severe debilitating back pain. Something she's still suffering from. And just so we're clear: the family collectively did what they could for as long as they could keep caring. She got on anti-depressants. We encouraged her to do therapy. Talk with her neighbors. I tried to take her on walks to keep her mobility from declining. Invited her out to dinner, to come over and watch a movie, hang out, make food. She could never keep up with the stuff that mattered and only half kept up with the smaller stuff. She tried hiring help to maintain the house but people swiftly said they could not handle the situation she'd created.
But I still love my mother and knew that, no matter how pissed off, disappointed and disgusted I was with her, isolating her further wouldn't help anything. So after all the things that were tried and didn't take, I still made plans to hang out on weekends sometimes, and holidays with her. Sometimes she'd stick to that, sometimes she wouldn't.
Last year, my dad (they divorced when I was a kid) organized a family get together for his mother's 90s birthday. Not wanting to exclude my mom despite knowing it was going to turn into a shit show, we brought her. The whole thing was kind of a disaster if I'm honest, without her involvement. The Europeans in the family brought covid, almost everyone in the group of 30 people caught it, everyone was annoyed and unhappy and sick. It was hot garbage. To this, my mother started drinking on the sly, got offended when someone asked her to move for a special photo they were taking, refused to accept their sincere apology and was an icy cold bitch the rest of the trip. Classic mom behavior.
And I let her have it on the way back. My family has always dealt in probably too frank honesty, so in keeping with that I told her how badly she'd behaved, how badly she'd treated people and why no one wanted to be around her because of things like this.
That was July of 2022.
Last Saturday was the first time I've seen my mother since I dropped her off at her house in 2022. We didn't speak for a while but eventually started talking again. I resumed inviting her to come hang out, for all the holidays. But this time she deferred on every single one. Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, her birthday. I've gotten pretty used to her doing this but I knew things had probably gotten really bad. I still called her every week to check in on her, so she could hear a friendly voice.
A few weeks ago she scares the entire family by claiming she had a home invasion. She tells an outlandish and impossible story of a herd of horses running down her street, a crowd of people outside her house, children and adults in her bedroom confronting her, the police showing up, her being interviewed by a TV crew.....truly delusional stuff. The whole family talks to her and eventually, not really, convinces her none of it happened. We're all worried but WTF can any of us do for her? I pre-emptively file a report with Adult Protective Services, explain everything going on to a case worker. They take my report but nothing happens.
I started to suspect something was truly wrong when I called her on a Thursday and hadn't heard back by late Friday. I checked with her sister (who stays in constant contact) and she said she hadn't gotten a call back since Wednesday. I can't lie, my first response was to give her another day to call me back but her sister convinced me to do the one thing I didn't want to do....and that was go over there. On the drive over I begin mentally preparing myself to find my mother's body.
I came to the back door and was greeted by the sight of waist high piles of garbage bags all over her living room. She'd long since reduced the space she operated in to just the living room, hallway to her bedroom and her bedroom/bathroom. There's a narrow line of walkable space by her couch. And a little corner left on the edge of the fireplace for her to sit and watch TV. Otherwise everything is walled in by garbage bags full of rotting food, empty liquor bottles, cans of cat food still sitting out from when the last one died. Here and there are unopened boxes from Amazon, bags of clothes ordered online but never opened. Flies were everywhere. The carpet is grey with rot. I wore a mask and tried not to, for the life of me, smell or I surely would have vomited. I stomped through the trash, maggots crawling on my shoes to the upstairs and called for her.
She's alive. I straight up tell her she needs to go to the hospital, and she begs me to do it tomorrow. I shouldn't have taken that as an answer but honestly, I was not prepared as I thought I was for what I had to see.
I come back on Sunday, after she delays me multiple hours asking me to wait. It takes her an hour to rouse herself out of bed and find clothes and things to take to the hospital. I wanted to help but I couldn't bring myself to root around that house with her, and I'm swimming in a toxic stew of anger, frustration, concern and horror. So I wait outside. After checking in several times I go in there again to bring her out and she's stuck on the toilet, so weak and shaky she can't even get her jeans down. So I have to do that for her, and then pull her pants back up after she's done. I lift her up off the toilet and begin body walking her out of the bathroom when she just gives out in my arms and starts collapsing to the floor. I lower her down and decide it's time to call EMS. I'm not strong enough to deadlift and carry a 140 pound woman down a flight of stairs and through piles of trash without seriously endangering her.
I call EMS and leave her inside on the floor of her bedroom (mercifully free of the amount of trash like the downstairs.) I warn them they won't get a stretcher in there and they will have to body her out. As I take them through the back (the front door is locked and blocked by trash), I hear one of the EMS guys exclaim "Jesus christ!" as he comes in. And who is waiting for us at the bottom of the stairs, gripping the bannister? The lady who 10 minutes before was crippled. The firemen looks pissed and I'm pissed too, this is a classic "my mother" moment.
I spend the next 7 hours in the ER with her. The doctors tell her she basically almost starved herself to death. She claims she hadn't eaten for 4 or 5 days due to a persistent headache and her aching back. The doc said that she was probably malnourished for months. Her potassium is so low they said she could have suffered a heart attack. Her electrolytes are "deranged." I give all the ER doctors, nurses, anyone that needs to know the full scoop. They say she has acute kidney damage from dehydration.
My mother and I mostly spend those 7 hours until they get her a room in silence. There's so little say that I haven't said before, sitting in an ER like this as I have before, for the same reasons as before. Her CT scan shows her brain is "old" according to the docs, her blood pressure is sky high, she's a mess of hypertension, and she almost starved to death but other than that.....? I guess she's good?
Somewhere in here I call Adult Protective Services, on the chance that my mom is going to do the stupidest thing possible. I call them to get a sense of what will force their hand, can a social worker get assigned, when and under what circumstances does the city get involved....? And they say it all comes down to competency.
So I order a neuropysch eval through the hospital she's at. I have for the last 4 years or so had Medical and Financial Power of Attorney over my mother if she is deemed incompetent. So I order a neuropsych eval to establish just that.
They deem her competent. THEY DEEM HER FUCKING COMPETENT. After everything I've told them, they still assert she's a rational person making bad decisions.
I tell my mother, whom I love.....that if she, in her competent state, chooses to go back to that house after discharge that I will just walk away. That I won't keep doing this. That she will die alone and I will come to find her body and sweep up the rest of her life. That is some hard shit to say to someone you love but I'm out of options for myself. So I told her you either go into Assisted Living or you're truly on your own. Her sister won't take over her life for her (she already has a medical needs person she cares for) and my brother, whose relationship with my mom is just as if not more fraught than mine, won't either.
Luckily, she agrees/agreed with me. For the moment. They moved her to a skilled nursing facility on Friday, which has one of the higher rated Assisted Living Facilities in town adjacent. And as with every nursing facility she's ever been in that I've brought her to, without fail, there's some poor broken sounding thing wailing for someone to come help them. Every. Single. Time. Just in case the guilt of feeling like I'm abandoning her there wasn't poignant enough.
Up until now.....I've dealt with all of this and not felt the need to write a fucking therapy novel about it. Today broke me though.
Today was her initial evaluation by the staff there for needs, competencies, plans, etc....they asked me, more than once, if I wanted to be present for it. I told them I thought it would be better for an accurate read on her situation if I WASN'T present. I really needed to know how mom fairs still, out of her house, without me there.
I came by to see her after work and that's when I was greeted with a shock. I've never thought of my mother as old, mentally. She's a smart woman, always has been. Today though she seemed especially frail. Confused. Scared. She openly admitted she couldn't make sense of the 11 page evaluation document she signed. (Even though it's itemized and perfectly clear.) She "thought she had been bamboozled." The scares didn't stop there. She said she tried to recall if her sister had yet visited her there. (She's been there 4 days.) She asked me what I meant by words I wasn't saying. She stared off into the nothing at times while talking or listening to me. She honestly seems worse off than before she left the hospital.
Today was the first time I feel like I was dealing with an old person. And that's maybe shaken me more than all the filth, degradation and bitterness I've seen from her. Her mother eventually developed dementia in a nursing home. I remember my brother and I sitting on the floor in the TV room of those places for hours while my mother spent time with her mother. And I know that years of hard drinking, stress, isolation and depression melts the human brain. And that what I might be seeing is the concrete beginning of that decline. Today is the first day in many, many years that my pity has eclipsed my anger toward her. And it scares me.
Not just because it's watching someone you know and love leave you despite still being alive. I'm scared for myself, for the enormous burden I now have to take on. She may not be able to make decisions for herself anymore, despite the first hospitals really incisive diagnosis of "competent." Which means I have to work out her assisted living situation. Which means I need access to her finances. Which I still have to go through her. You know where that information she needs is? Yeah. Her house. I have to go back into her house to even hopefully start this process.
And beyond that? I'll have to find another restoration company to once again remove all the garbage, try and salvage what they can, rip out the carpet again and probably demo the whole kitchen, the epicenter of my mother's gross habits.
And then I'll have to sell the house. Even though by all rights its mine, I don't want it. I can't live there, not with all the memories and years of neglect and psychic badness that has soaked into the walls. Watching your childhood home rot before your eyes damages you in ways you can't really imagine. When and if I get a home for myself, I want a fresh start.
I probably only figured out what it means to be an adult in my mid 30s. This whole ordeal represents a level of adulting I don't feel prepared for. I feel so horribly alone in this process. My brother and aunt are there to provide moral support but neither of them truly want to get involved. I had to suggest to my brother that he come down here and see mom in the state she's in, it wasn't an idea he natively came to himself.
I am, for lack of a better term, panicking right now and full of anxiety. It's not just the pain of watching the first steps of my mother's decline into being another lost soul in a nursing home that I don't really want to be around. But also all the time and energy I'm going to yet again devote to my mom's life because I'm the one left holding the pieces. So many things I don't know, so many places to make mistakes along the way.
There's so much I feel right now. I don't want to abandon my mother to a nursing home but she didn't give herself or anyone else any choice. At 74 she should be able to enjoy her life as a functioning elder, but she swiss cheesed her brain and her capabilities. I love my mother but I don't want to go down with her. I've struggled for years with the sense that I could do something more to help her but she eventually drove me away and I had to learn to emotionally detach from the idea of her future. But all I was doing was kicking that pain down the road to when I would be forced to deal with it, in a time like this.
I guess the one thing I can be thankful for is that she was responsible and raised me well and right (despite all the baggage she gifted to me as part of it) and she is financially able to at least have somewhere to live. This places wants $250,000 proof of income before they'll even talk about her living there. That's what it means to grow old in America. Got money? Have a shitty place with too few staff where no one truly cares. Don't got money? Die in squalor.
There's no good way to end this. But having written it I feel calmer, for today. My family asks what they can do to help but what do I tell them? "Take over responsibility for all this."? "Go into her house and pull out the things she needs."? I know my job will give me the time I need to deal with this but......fucking A. I can't claim to have a ton of joy in my life. But I would have taken an absence of joy over a ton of pain.
There's nothing special about a child having to become the parent as their parents age. Most people go through it. But combining that with an unrepentant addict who accelerated their decline is a special kind of hell because I have as much blame and resentment to give as pity. Would that she had just aged. That would be hard enough. But that she continued to traumatize me even as a 40 year old man is what makes this so hard to handle. I'm no saint. I've treated her poorly before too when I finally had to give vent to my rage and frustration. I can't get mad at her for getting old. But destroying herself despite me begging her for years not to, then being held accountable for her future? Fucking. Bullshit! I remember, before she ever quit her job I saw the signs of her drinking and told her, asked her, begged her, pleaded with her, to get it under control before it destroyed her and our relationship. I can remember the night I told her "I don't like talking to you when you're this drunk. I'm not going to do it anymore."
In a way, I owe her for who I am. I figured out a bit late in life who I was and who I needed to be, in large part due to her example of how not to be. I've got my addictions and hell, one of them might kill me. But I will never let myself slip into the depths of self pity and degradation she experienced.
If you've read this far, then read my personal text and believe it. Never, ever give up on yourself no matter how shitty things are. Never give in to the voice that calls from the abyss and says it's better. We all get there eventually. Live the life you were given, all of it, in excellence. You only truly appreciate how precious it is as you watch it gradually slip away in someone else.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9757900 times)