My wife’s mother was a great example of doing everything right through the decisions that she made, but dementia led her to become disabled. She had a positive outlook on life. She didn’t drink alcohol or smoke, and she made sure that she had an active lifestyle and ate healthy well-balanced meals. She also scheduled regular appointments with her doctor and had yearly physicals. All those things were true until she wasn’t able to remember to make those doctor’s appointments. My wife and I missed the signs until we saw a notice from the insurance company that her homeowner’s policy had been cancelled. Her friends started to reach out to us that they were concerned about her ability to take care of herself. Her husband was 87, had hearing difficulties and was used to his wife handling all the cooking and household responsibilities including finances. I don’t know why we missed the signs, but these wakeup calls suddenly became very clear and it was urgent that we needed to step in to help.
My wife’s parents never reached out to us and my parents and grandparents didn’t require a high level of care as they aged so this was all new to us. I guess that my wife and I assumed that things would be fine with her parents as they aged, and we would see any problems before they became serious. In retrospect, her parents didn’t think they needed more assistance and maybe they didn’t want to be a bother to us. I know that my wife and I don’t want to be a burden to our children. However, we wouldn’t have looked at this as a bother and would have wanted to help her parents. Now we were questioning how we could have been so unaware about what was happening to her parents. We looked at this situation as a failing on our part.
We had hired a personal health aide to be at their house to help with cooking, cleaning and to drive them to appointments. Her mother told us that it wasn’t necessary, and she could still take care of her house. She told us that her husband still could drive them to go shopping and to appointments. Thank heaven for my mother-in-law’s friends that called us and told us how frightened they were. They told us a totally different story. They were concerned about their safety in the house when the health aide wasn’t in the house and how dangerous they thought my father-in-law was when he drove his car. We went to their house and stayed there to see how bad things really were. Within just a couple of days with the home health aide still coming to the house, we realized that they couldn’t live there without full-time assistance.
It was fortunate that this happened during the summer. We were both on a teacher’s schedule and off for the summer. We were able to take immediate action and told them that they were coming to our house which is over a hundred miles away. They didn’t want to leave their house and told us they were fine, and we were making too much about a situation that wasn’t really a problem. We convinced them that we just wanted them to come to our house for a visit and they agreed to that. My father-in-law insisted on driving his car, but the car wouldn’t start. He had owned an automotive repair business, and he couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I knew right away that it had a dead battery so I told him that we would fix it when we brought them back to their house.
Next time I want to talk about how bad things were and how ill-prepared we were.
Abilities Not Disabilities 