re: Thread for OTers with aging parents

Yep. Have been dealing with an older family member. Memory is just shot and they don’t realize it. No short term memory anymore. Makes up stories that never happened and then tends to obsess over things such as finances. Simple things like the mail coming or a random phone number calling can become things for hours even days. If you were to check vitals though things are good considering they are 91.

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my mother is 83. Although my dad has some physical problems, his mind is razor sharp. My mother however seems to be showing signs of mental decline. In the past 7 or 8 years she's had 5 or 6 episodes variously diagnosed as seizures, TIA's and episodes of confusion or brief psychosis. She's recovered each time more or less back to baseline, but in the last few months she's started to noticeably decline, and especially in the last few weeks. Her short term memory Has gotten pretty bad and she's starting to imagine things that didn't happen, or didn't happen the way she thinks they did. As might be expected,

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Most likely, Vascular Dementia.

It sucks, and I am sorry you are going through this. There are no medicines that can stop the progression of this disease. Be thankful for the time you have with her (and your father) and treat each day as a blessing you get to spend with them.

My grandmother lived to 94.


The 5 years or so, her mind started to deteriorate. Nothing major at first, and shed joke about it. An episode of Castle would come on, and she loved the show and knew the characters. But she'd tell us that she had already seen this episode, but couldn't remember it, so that was good as she could enjoy it again.



At the end, her mind went fast. Within two weeks she had full blown dementia. She died not too long after it set in.




It's a hard thing to witness. After watching that, and watching my aunt waste away from cancer, I really think I was lucky that my mom died in her sleep at 43. My cousins had to watch their mother waste away. My aunts'had to watch their mother turn into something they never knew before.

My last memory of my mother was of her being the same person she was her entire life. I can hold that image of her in my mind. A gift my cousins and aunts don't have.

My father passed when he was 57. He was an only child. Taking care of my grandparents fell to me and my sister. My Grandmother was always a bit off not crazy but just eccentric. Dementia did hit most members of her family. My Grandfather was sharp as a tack but his body was starting to betray him. My dad passed in 2010. My Grandfather passed in 2014. My Grandmother basically went bat shite after my Grandfather passed. It started slow but progressed steadily. What made it worse actually was that she was very mobile. Me or my wife would get calls while we were at work that she was just walking down the road. She would drink nothing but coffee and forget to drink water and get dehydrated or a bad UTI we would have to admit her to the hospital. Finally got her to go to an outpatient facility 5 days a week (pick her up in a bus/van) which helped since my family is small and we all work. It also helped with her memory some and the random wandering off. Later she got to the stage where she was extremely paranoid (people stealing shite, Medicare was going to arrest her) and started having visual and auditory hallucinations. It was sad but some of the shite she said was fricking hilarious. She swore there was a banner hanging over the road in front of our houses that had buttholes and vaginas all over it. She also swears she saw me working in the front yard in a pink shirt and get raped by some dudes that ran out of the woods. She went downhill faster after that stuff started. We finally had to admit her to an assisted living facility which was really good and I know extended her life. She passed away this past December.

I asked one of her neurologist about all the sex crap she was imagining and her language was way more bawdy than it used to be. He said that was very common in people going through dementia. He said from his talks with her she was also remembering things she had read years ago as real life. She read a ton of old paperback romance novels before she went downhill and he said that contributed to it.

It’s been a year since my dad passed at 83. He had dementia for 2 years and it slowly robbed him of his quality of life. My brothers and sisters really stepped up and everyone chipped in to help…the thing we focused on was my mom…she was doing everything for my dad so we all made sure SHE was ok. In those situations, the caregiver can be forgotten.
I lived 7 hrs from them by car so I would visit ever other month or so…my dad would be worse every time I saw him…I ended up morning him in stages…every time something changed, I would mourn what was lost…it was pretty hard but when he finally passed, it wasn’t as sad because I had done a lot of the mourning already.

My dad was a shirt-off-his-back kind of man. Great guy, everyone loved him. My mom. On the other hand, has always been a mean-arse bully, made people around her miserable. She spent the last 30 years blowing all their money at the casinos. My dad passed from a stroke in 2019, and mom began to decline from dementia during covid. It took a year but I finally got her placed in a nursing home. She calls me daily bitching at me, telling me to come get her, she wants to go home, blah blah. I send her to voice-mail. I Don't feel sorry for her mean arse one bit.

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You're all lucky your people made it to their 80s

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This. My dad got diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer right after covid. I lived with him at the time after we both lost our jobs. I had to watch him slowly decay into a walking corpse. He made it a year and a half til the cancer took him at 62.

All you OTers with old parents take comfort in knowing they have lived a full life.

I’m sorry you are dealing with this. I’ve dealt with a loved one with this. All I can say is stay very patient and loving towards them and enjoy them while you have them. If its possible to keep them at home, try to do so. If it becomes a danger for them or someone else consider putting them somewhere very caring.

I know the feeling. My dad has long passed. My mom is 98. she started this same situation at about the same age. She has had health issues but the doctor says she's as healthy as one can expect for 98 years old. Very hard to carry on a conversation with and will restart a conversation after you have completed it like it never happened. Just glad to have her still around. Sad at times, but she's still my mom.

I woke up this morning and everything seemed alright, then it all comes back to me. A few weeks ago my mother was cooking, writing her own checks, driving (probably shouldn't have been driving but she was). The change has been so rapid I'm not sure she should even be left alone now. My dad says he's not ready to consider the next step but if this continues it can't be long in coming.