We placed my MIL into a very nice facility yesterday. We had been discussing this with her for some time now. Different reactions on different days, from being a little sad, to knowing it was needed, but never angry. When she got up, we told her that today was the day. Immediately she got furious. " We weren't taking her anywhere, I'd rather die first, You both are DEAD to me, never come see me again, "I'll find a way to just die". She ate, went back to lay down still claiming she wasn't going. When she gets back up, she starts screaming again over and over. She looks at us with hatred, spitting on the floors, tried to spit on me, but wasn't standing close enough to get me. After several attempts to get her dressed as she said "Where I'm going it won't matter if I'm naked" and started taking off all her clothes in front of her son, my husband which I know she would be ashamed of if she were within her right mind. We finally get her dressed, in the car, she is still cussing, spitting in disgust at us. We go down the driveway, she looks back at our home and says "Bye house. I hope someone comes and breaks every window in your house". Just crazy talking. After arriving at the facility which is extremely nice, and small, only 20 patients, she jumps out of the car because she's home and for us to "leave and never come back," to "I can't believe my own family is throwing
me away", to "I hope you have 200 children and NONE of them want you". So while I didn't expect it to go easy today, my questions are first, is this type of behavior in dementia/alzheimers normal or typical? Why yesterday did she remember the sequence of events happening ALL day long when normally she can't even remember where she is from minute to minute or sometimes thinks she's in a home already because our house is large and always wants to know where the other residents are. She came to us from a facility she shared with my FIL after he passed away. And to be honest, in driving away to come back home after dropping her off, I felt a huge burden had been lifted from my shoulders. I am relieved and I am quite ashamed to say that for the first time in an extremely long 6 months, (only 6 months!!!) that I am happy. And I feel ashamed admitting that. I certainly don't want my husband to know this. I had the honor and privilege of taking care of my mother when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor at only 60 years old. She was diagnosed, treated with radiation and passed away within the space of 3 months. From the minute she found out, she was always caring, appreciative of the things my sister and I did for her, always thanking us, telling us how she loved us and never complained. While she didn't have dementia, the tumor did sometimes make her not realize some things and get confused about who someone was, or where she was at times. I am not romanticizing that as I know people can sometimes think their passed loved one were perfect. She wasn't perfect, but she also never complained or whined about her situation, the complete opposite of my MIL since she has come to live with us. So last question, is this, are my feelings about my MIL and being happy now that she's not in our home normal and typical or am I comparing the two experiences and find that I would never have been able to care for her or have as much compassion as I should have because of my experience caring for my own mom. While I do feel guilty about it, its not enough to make me unhappy. Am I just a horrible person? I'm sorry this is so long....
And behavior normal? With dementia nothing is normal and they are bound to say and do anything. What you experienced yesterday is normal for mom and her dementia.
It sounds like you found a nice place for her. Know that it will be very difficult for all of you for awhile. Many say two weeks, but with my mom it never ended and she was in memory care facilities for two years before she finally passed.
Mom was admitted to the hospital 3 or 4 times for geriatric psychic assessments. The first was the first week of facility living. Nothing is unexpected and nothing unusual with some.
Two facilities? Yup, mom was kicked out of the first one because of her behaviors. This happens. It would be a great idea to have a back up plan.
Good luck and i hope all remains quiet.
your reply cleared up a lot of questions as my LO’s behavior mirrors that which you describe. My LO was in geriatric psyc hospital twice. The second time was more effective and each day I hope the meds continue working. He nearly got kicked out of an exclusive facility and many don’t want problem clients.
Caring for your mom and caring for your MIL are two entirely different situations. Not only are they completely different people, their health issues were also extraordinarily different. First, I gather you were quite a bit younger when you cared for mom. I also gather that your mom's diagnosis was much different in terms of "time left" so to speak. I think a lot of your guilt is coming from "I was ok taking care of my mom, but I don't want to take care of my MIL, who is my husband's mom".
Just because you were willing to be one person's caregiver doesn't mean that you should automatically be willing to take on the caregiving responsibilities of everyone you know, because then where does it stop? If you follow that logic, then if you raised your kids, you should be willing to raise all the other kids that anyone in your family might have. You have the right to choose to whom you give care - if anyone. And, as many others here who have put their loved ones into facilities, MIL's caregiving will need to continue - just not under your roof with your responsibilities being 24/7. She will still need things done for her that will fall onto your and your husband's shoulders. You've done a wonderful job taking care of her in your home, and you will continue to take care of her, just in a different setting and capacity. And that's ok!
You say you don't want your husband to know how relieved you are that his mom has been placed into a care facility...but I would bet he's just as relieved as you are. Maybe for different reasons, but I'll bet it's a load off his shoulders as well. And that's ok, too!
Forgive yourself for any negative feelings you may have/had towards MIL and give yourself permission to enjoy your life. It's really, really ok. You made arrangements for MIL to be safe and cared for, and by doing so have fulfilled your responsibilities to her.
(((Hugs)))
I would have to say that your mother knew that she needed more help that wanted to live at home and not in a care facility. And I don't blame her have you ever checked them out really the food the lunch the treatment?
Her acting in such ways was her way of saying I am not going! Even though she knew there needed to be extra help and a little lifted off of you.
Most people I know do not want to die in a care facility let alone die alone what's the new covid-19 outbreak.
You may be comparing apples to oranges. On how someone handles different situations.
I just recently had a fall an injured both my legs called my son from the emergency room and he told me he did not have time for this right now.
I felt just the same as her, the doctor is the ER said he could put me in a home. At this point in time my son chooses not to speak to me and I really don't care. Never once did I tell him I didn't have time for him. I am now living alone have multiple handy devices and I can live in my own home and be safe. I have nursing coming to my house three days a week and I'm fine with that.
And I also told him basically the same thing one day his daughter will not be there for him and his wife what goes around comes around. But maybe it's how I was raised we took care of family and a home was not an option!!!
If you're feeling some type of guilt then your heart is speaking to you.
Good luck in your older age!
Placing an elder in a place where they can get 24/7 care— or care that their families just can’t physically give— is not throwing them away. Plus this is the Mother in Law, not the mother. OP should not had been the caregiver in the first place.
You’re able to live at home with some help, and that’s great. With dementia and emotional issues, this isn’t possible for a lot of people. If their families didn’t care, they’d just let their elder suffer.
It's normal for your MIL to be acting unhinged on her way to the new care home. There is no rhyme or reason to dementia, nor is there any day-to-day sameness involved. One day she can be lucid and you think, hey, maybe she's not that bad after all!!! Then the next day, she's spitting and cussing and you think, hey, she's unhinged and has to get out of here before I lose my mind!! That's the nature of dementia: up and down and you never know what the heck to expect!! And that, in and of itself, makes the condition even WORSE to deal with. The 'not knowing' is worse than anything.
In a care home environment, your MIL will adjust eventually. She'll make friends, get hot meals, entertainment, activities, and everything else she needs in the way of help with daily activities. You can go back to being the daughter in law and your husband can go back to being her son instead of her care givers. It puts the relationships back in their proper places and you can all breathe a bit easier.
Last but not least, it was easier for you to take care of your own mother because she didn't have dementia; an affliction which turned her into a child throwing tantrums and spitting, or playing with feces and peeing on the floor. You are comparing apples to oranges and expecting yourself to have the same 'compassion' for your MIL that you had for your mother in spite of the fact that the two women presented 100% different issues for you to deal with. Right? Most people are unable to deal with dementia sufferers at home, after it progresses to a certain point. Memory Care homes are the very, very best and safest option, as most of us eventually realize.
Don't feel guilty; guilt means you've done something wrong or bad
Don't feel shame; shame means you ARE something wrong or bad
You are neither. You are just one human being trying to be all things to all people at all times, which is quite impossible. Allow yourself to BE human, to admit you can't do it all, and then let go and let God handle what you cannot.
Good luck!
I remember a woman who was brought to live at my mom's memory care facility. She had been a nurse so she was pretty sharp on some things, and she knew full well she'd been moved to a locked facility. She cried all day, every day for a week, and every time I visited my mother she was out in the courtyard pacing around weeping. Within a week, you'd think she'd moved to a resort. She was loving life and had made friends, and everything was fine. She's been happy as a clam every since.
The only "good" thing about dementia is that a new place becomes home to them very quickly. Your accompanying relief is also totally normal, because you know she's safe and cared for now. Don't beat yourself up.
My friend had to place her husband in a home just before the virus lock down so was not able to visit him. He too was close to unmanageable but did settle down and about a week later when they talked via zoom, he said he couldn’t talk they were looking at buying furniture and he had to go.??? Guess he was settling in.
Your MIL will go through many different things. Don’t be surprised at anything and don’t expect. Dementia is quite a trip as I now 13 years after Mom passed, am caregiver for my husband with Alzheimers. Know you did the best for her.
“Dementia” MEANS that she can no longer use reason, facts, and personal observations to manage her reactions to the events in which she is involved.
Comparisons to your own thinking and behavior, or to your mother’s thinking and behavior, cannot result in valid interpretations of your MIL’s behavior. That includes what she is saying, or screaming, or yelling.
There are times and circumstances in the behavior of people with dementia, especially early on, when they may be able to function on a level that appears to be relatively reasonably. Two images helped me understand this.
The mind of a person with dementia may seem to “short circuit”, like an electrical appliance that isn’t firmly plugged into a socket. The electricity may light a light fixture, but the light may blink, or dim, or go out altogether. I have observed this in several relatives who had dementia.
Another example was given to me by a wonderful therapist who worked with my LO when she entered Memory Care. She described LO’s thinking like a donut of reason, which surrounded a mass of confusion, memory failure, anger, inability to recall and process what she was hearing......and said that LO was becoming more and more anxious because she was trying harder and harder maintain the donut of normalcy, but the mass of disrupted thinking increases and increases, making preserving the donut harder and harder.
No one is to blame, and ABSOLUTELY NO ONE should feel guilty. Your MIL has been placed, with love and consideration for her safety, in the best setting you could arrange for her. EVERYONE would have preferred that she and her loved ones be spared this vicious disease, but tragically she wasn’t.
Nearly ALL of us would have wanted to make other decisions on behalf of our LOs, BUT THERE WERE NO HAPPY, PERFECT DECISIONS AMONG THE CHOICES THAT WE HAD. So we made less than perfect choices and did the very best we could.
And so did you. Be at peace, and be grateful for the happiness you’ve earned.
Dementia is terrible thing, it steals our loved ones and places the caregivers in an impossible situation. Your relief is justified. We caregivers are not equipped or trained to deal with dementia. And even if we were, it’s such A terrible thing to deal with the abuse that comes with the disease.
I, too, was relieved when we moved my MIL to a locked facility. When she was living with us, I had to basically hide from her 24/7 in my own house. For 2 years I was a ghost, cooking dinner for her and my husband then making a plate to eat in our family room alone. If I sat at the table with my husband and MIL she would scream horrible things at me even when I was completely silent and attack me for no reason at all. Family functions were no better. Her family didn’t understand the disease or the person she had become. They couldn’t understand her hatred of me or why I would sit somewhere out of her sight, or leave a room when she walked in.
It broke our hearts to put her in a facility, but it gave me a small sense of peace to be able to live in my home without hiding from her. I could occasionally visit her and she would act like I wasn’t even there, but didn’t scream at and attack me.
You deserve your peace of mind in your own home. There is no reason to feel guilty or that you’ve done something wrong by her. We are not equipped to detach ourselves emotionally from those that we love while caregiving. I hope that everyone’s comments help you to feel better about the situation. You deserve to feel at peace.
Your MIL has a brain disease that alters her thinking, rational side and behavior. It is very difficult to be around that behavior because it is often causes them to say cruel, crazy and hateful things. My dad too at times was verbally abusive. He also said we threw him away (a common thing they like to say). Please please please know that what you feel is so normal that it's likely that we all feel or felt it. I know you wish your MIL was like your mom just as I wished my dad could have been sweet like my mom but dear, this is dementia. Why wouldn’t you feel relief not to have to be under constant verbal abuse? Why wouldn’t you feel relief not to be under stress? Why wouldn’t you want a more normal life? I would also bet your husband is relieved too. You have done nothing wrong. You are feeling simply normal emotions so lose the stupid guilt. You are normal!
There is no way to fix everything. There is only doing the very best you can.
Those of us who are good and decent people (translate MOST of us) have uncomfortable feelings around having to do things this painful. When my brother died last May there were days I longed to have his suffering over. And at the end, along with knowing that the man who has been here for me every single day of my 78 years was gone, I knew such relief. He had been diagnosed with probably early Lewy's. As we talked about everything all our lives we talked about this, where it would eventually take him, what he would lose, and how we, Hansel and Gretel in the Woods all our lives, would negotiate this scary forest together. Now he was gone. And my strongest feeling was relief. That he didn't have to go there anymore, with all the losses.
How do you say to someone that you felt RELIEF at the loss. You just DID. I just DID. And it is so important to tell the truth of these things. I don't believe for a second that your heart doesn't BREAK for her. I KNOW it does. But I also see you are strong enough to defend your one and only life the best you can and STILL take care of this poor woman. My heart breaks for her. There isn't a one of us who doesn't recognize that this, if we live long enough, is where we are going. And the awful truth is that we WILL, for the most part, be helpless and unwanted.
As much as I loved my bro we never for a moment thought about living together; I know my limitations. He knew his control issues.
We do the best we can. There is no way to avoid pain. Not for your MIL, not for you, not for my bro, not for me. But while life goes on we must live it for ourselves, and help others to the extent we are able.
My heart goes out to you. You did the right thing. You did it in the right way. It is just that there is no "fix" for any of this. We come face to face with out limitations, our inadequacies, and broken hearts all around.
That said, the amount and quality of care is extremely difficult for family to do- and it gets more difficult as time goes by. Your MIL is much more typical than your mother, for many reasons.
My mother, who is now 103, vehemently lashed out with, “Don’t you put me in a nursing home!!”
It took about five to six family members to take care of all her needs plus her house. It was daunting.
One night she fell on the way to the bathroom and broke her femur (of course, she was alone).
Fortunately, she got to a hospital for the broken bone and when she was well enough, they sent her to a skilled nursing facility- which transitioned into an Assisted Living.
She is there now, safe and quite content. Yes, she wants to “go home”, but deep down she knows she is much better off where she is.
Her family and friends visit often and she has a new social life.
A lousy way to make the move, but she is so much better cared for at a place that is equipped to do the job.
You did the right thing! Visit her. Bring her stuff. It was the wisest option.
Best wishes
Here's something people don't think of, but it happened with my mother. She is in a very nice, very expensive memory care residence. It was a good decision at the time, over a year ago, but now, since the pandemic, things have changed and I would prefer to move her to my city, 3,000 miles away from her area. But she fell in love with another resident about 10 months ago and they are together 24 hours per day. She doesn't want to leave! He is worse off than she is. He gets very agitated if she doesn't stay in the same room with him, 24 hours per day. So not only is she trapped in the building due to pandemic, she is trapped in a room with an agitated man who yells at staff on a daily basis. I'm paying $9,000 per month (of her money) so she can live with daily yelling matches in her room, and of course the dip in quality of care she's getting due to pandemic, with staff shortages and substitute staff who have less training. I'd like to save the money and take her out--at least she would be able to go outdoors every day if she lived with me--but she doesn't want to leave her boyfriend, so I would be the bad guy, big time, if I took her out.
Sounds like your MIL is pretty crabby, but she could fall in love with a resident too. That would throw a monkey wrench into the plan if you needed to move her for some reason.
Main idea--things you never thought of and never even heard of are going to come up. Every week. So enjoy this taste of freedom while you can.
So you did the right thing to help your MIL get the help she needs in a smaller residential facility. Her first week(s) may be a little difficult as she adjusts to their routine. In the long run, she will do fine and get the attentive help she needs - 24/7.
Feeling "happy" about moving her is not selfish or "wrong". You have been under a lot of stress caring for a person that needed more supervision and care than you could reasonably provide. Knowing that she is getting the care she needs and you no longer need to worry round the clock - is relief from stress. That is why you feel happy. A horrible person would not care and you do. Be OK with your new current circumstances.
You said it in the third sentence.
I would not want my children to care for me .
Why would anyone want that. Of course if they have dementia they are not thinking clearly
For this reason a living will is important and discussing your wants and desires ahead of time.
Best