Caregiving Saga Draws to a Conclusion

I am going through an interesting time in my life. My dad is well past the point when he should have moved to a facility, and I am working on getting him installed in one, but he is belligerent and says he will not go.

I’ve written a few unpublished pieces about this. I decided not to post them because I had concerns that I was venting instead of saying constructive things. I also thought I might be dishonoring my dad. I have done that in the past. God is against people who dishonor their parents.

English-speakers do a poor job of distinguishing between “honor” and “respect.” God wants us to honor our parents, but we are not actually required to respect them. There are at least hundreds of millions of parents no intelligent person can respect. To honor someone is to treat them as though they deserve respect, whether they do or not. I guess it’s what military people mean when they say, “Salute the rank, not the man.”

I doubt the marines who used to watch Barack Obama get into Marine One respected him, but they still saluted him.

I know my dad’s shortcomings. I can’t respect him, because respect has to be earned. I can still show him honor. That doesn’t mean I have to pretend he’s perfect or collaborate with him when he says things that aren’t true.

The question of whether you’re dishonoring a parent becomes cloudy when the parent is a gaslighter. Gaslighters lie constantly. A gaslighter will beat his wife and then convince her she made him do it. He may cheat on his wife and then convince her she’s insane to believe the evidence she has seen. Gaslighters slander their victims to others. Because gaslighters promulgate lies against the people they use, they are different from other adversaries. Their lies have to be countered publicly, just as they were disseminated.

My dad is a huge gaslighter. He used to blame my mother’s cooking for his weight problems. He blamed her for a number of his own misdeeds. He says he was a great father and husband, and that the rest of us wrecked the family. These days he tells me a number of things that aren’t true. I’ll list some.

1. “You don’t love your father.” He says this because I want to put him in an ALF. He hopes I will feel guilty when he says this, but I don’t. It annoys me and reminds me of the difficulty I have had respecting him.

2. “I would do it for you.” That’s not true. My mother died from cancer, and he didn’t take care of her. He drove her to medical appointments and so on, but he never did what I do. He used to go on business trips and leave her by herself, against her wishes. He and his sisters put his mother in a facility. He didn’t care for her. He only visited twice. He didn’t do anything for my sister when she had cancer. He has two children, and he has never changed a diaper.

I should also add that caring for demented people is much harder than caring for cancer patients, because they can’t help or cooperate, and they may be ungrateful and cruel. My dad fights with me for selfish reasons, even when he knows it’s wrong and that he’s making me suffer unnecessarily.

My mother was a breeze to look after, all the way to the end. People complain about the way they suffer when they care for cancer patients. Compared to dementia caregivers, they have it easy.

3. “You owe it to me because you’re being paid well.” Not true. I was the only beneficiary in his will a decade before he became demented, and there were no strings attached. He would have left me everything anyway, and this is what a parent is expected to do. It’s not a favor.

A person who earns wages is an employee, not a beneficiary, and nobody pays anyone else to be a son.

If my dad were merely a difficult parent, I wouldn’t need to mention his failings to him or anyone else very much. Because he mounts a constant propaganda campaign, I have a need and an obligation to debunk the things he says. He needs to hear the truth, and I need to hear myself say it so I don’t get poisoned.

I’m very direct with him now. I say things like, “You can’t make me feel guilty or manipulate me. It’s a waste of time to try.” I say, “This situation isn’t my fault,” and, “I’m not the problem.”

He doesn’t just yell at me because I don’t cooperate. He scolds me for problems I have nothing to do with, including dementia itself. He asks me about the disease, and when I tell him the facts, he says things like, “You certainly make it sound wonderful.” He thanks me sarcastically. When he does that, I have to say things like, “I didn’t make this happen. It’s just life.” I shouldn’t have to say that.

I remind him that he has never taken care of anyone, including his children and wife, so he doesn’t understand what I deal with. I remind him that an inheritance doesn’t make me a servant for life or obligate me in any way whatsoever. I have told him I don’t actually have to do anything for him.

It makes him angry to hear the truth, but I’m not responsible for his anger. I don’t consider it a serious problem or something I need to address. It’s something he chooses. He can stop whenever he wants.

I do feel bad about his future. He is at the point now where the ALF people are talking about admitting him to memory care, which is not as pleasant as the main facility. They have special red doors which stay locked from the outside. The atmosphere in memory care is not as nice. Some of the patients are a real mess. In the main area, he could tell himself things weren’t so bad. Behind the red doors, he would be reminded of the truth all the time.

It sounds bad, but there is no choice. His wife is dead. His daughter is a sociopath. His other relatives will not do anything for him. He has no friends. I am the only person on earth who cares about him, and I can’t do the job alone. It’s not just that I prefer not to. It’s impossible. I have to be free to take care of business. I have to be free to travel and get things done. I need free time to look after the house and myself. If he had 5 married sons and a bunch of grown grandchildren, sure, we could do it. He didn’t invest in family, though, so I’m all he has.

He made an uncomfortable bed for himself, but he’s trying to make me lie in it.

On the one hand, it’s stressful going through this period of transition. Things will be unpleasant until he’s out of the house. On the other, good things are happening. The more he slips, the more freedom I get in certain areas.

He can’t walk up stairs now. That means the upper floor of the house is all mine. He can’t come up here and get things dirty or mess with business papers. He can’t barge into my bathroom while I’m showering and demand that I do things for him. If I don’t want him to touch or know about something, I just bring it upstairs. When I decide I’m not going to continue a conversation, I walk upstairs, and it’s over.

I can read newspapers now. I got out of the habit because he used to get the papers so filthy. He would throw them on the dirty floor by his toilet. Now he gets up no earlier than 10:30. I get the papers. I read them. I do the puzzles. It’s wonderful. He likes doing crossword puzzles, but in 2018, he started taking a very long time to finish them, so now they back up on him. We get three puzzles a day. As long as I leave him 4 or 5 every week, he’s fine.

I don’t have to go to restaurants or take him on errands. I used to take him to lunch several times a week, and he liked to go to the grocery store. It would take him 10 minutes to get to a restaurant table now, and walking grocery store aisles is out of the question. Also, there are severe hygiene issues that make travel in the car something he only does when there is no other choice.

I’m sorry he’s not doing well, but it’s wonderful to know I can go where I want and walk at a normal speed. I like eating at home, where I’m not confronted with menus full of 1500-calorie entrees. We’re also saving some money.

He forgot how to cook, so I prepare everything he eats, and he doesn’t mess the kitchen up the way he used to. It’s getting cleaner and cleaner. He doesn’t care what he eats, probably because he has no sense of smell, so I buy frozen food and microwave it. It’s fast and easy. He used to stand in front of the pantry, eating Raisin Bran out of the box, and cereal went all over the floor. Now I can decide where he eats, so there is less mess.

He gets upset because we don’t eat together. Unfortunately, that’s a necessity. Because he yells at me so much, and because I spend so much time cleaning horrifying messes and looking after him, I leave him on his own for long periods so I can recover and attend to other things.

I have explained this to him. I told him that because he’s not in assisted living, the time I spend with him is not normal time. We don’t get to socialize because I’m too busy doing very unpleasant things. It’s a choice he made, so I’m not going to suffer for it.

He has always liked to put people on the spot and make them feel awkward. He likes to pressure people to tell him he’s right and that everything is fine. When I was a kid, he would do very ugly things and then sit us down and say, “Now smile. Smile, damn it!” It wasn’t enough to tolerate the things he did. He insisted we tell him we were enjoying it.

The other day, he said it seemed like I didn’t enjoy his company, and then he asked me if that was the case. He was trying to make me feel guilty. He thought I would be cowed, and that I would say something to make him feel good. I did not enable him. I told him it was true; I did not enjoy his company. I said that when I was with him, I was always working or being yelled at. I told him that if he were in assisted living, other people would take over for me, and then I could visit and do other things with him.

I don’t know if I sound like an ogre or what. I suppose it depends on whether the observer is an enabler. Enablers have always been very hard on me; they used to be very nasty to me when I stood up for my mother against my sister. Sometimes my mother herself interfered. She was the queen of enablers, and my sister squeezed her like a tube of toothpaste until she died. I don’t have any respect for the opinions of enablers.

It’s easier to attack a reasonable person than an abuser, because you know you won’t get a cruel, sadistic response. If you can get an abuser’s target to accept guilt and go along, it makes things easier for the rest of the crowd. It’s a vile sin, however. You should never sacrifice the innocent to make the guilty give you peace.

“Just take her to the drugstore one last time so we can have peace.” “Tell him whatever he wants to hear so we can all go to bed.” “Cover the forged check and say you wrote it yourself.” No. You may have to do things like that when you’re young and powerless. When you’re an adult, you confront. It’s the only way out.

I have a friend whose mother is mentally ill. The mother is a control freak and an abuser. You would not believe the things she has said to my friend. When my friend was admitted to Harvard, her much-older brother sat her down and convinced her to stay home on their Florida farm and wait on her deranged, spoiled mother and her growing collection of sick, hoarded “rescue” animals. He didn’t want to deal with the hassle, but he was willing to sacrifice his little sister’s life. He will be judged for that.

I’m not my friend. I’m not powerless. I can tell the innocent from the guilty, and I will not devote my life to enabling. I was happy to help my dad while I could, and it was the right thing to do. Now it’s time for tough love, and that’s what he gets.

As soon as I can work it out, my dad will be in an ALF, and my life will be completely different. I wish he could be part of it, but due to the existence of free will, that’s how Christianity works. Some people listen and get in the ark, and the others stand outside with their pride and claw on the hull when the water rises. You may feel bad for them, but you’re not supposed to jump over the side and join them, and you can’t pull them in with you.

A few weeks ago, my dad had a better attitude toward ALF’s. Something has happened since then. I assume it’s demonic. Doesn’t matter. Demons were put on this earth to lose.

Now you know how things stand here. It’s like I’m in labor. It’s not much fun, but it will end soon, and then things will improve tremendously.