My mother was diagnosed with dementia four years ago, probably Alzheimer's Disease. My dad died five years ago, but during his last year of life, he was aware that my mom was starting to have some serious memory lapses. During my last visit to see him before he died, I noticed it too. Specifically, my mom was driving us home from her favorite restaurant and got completely lost.
My sister has been taking care of my mom. They live about 1,000 miles away from me, and everybody on my mom's side of the family lives 200 miles or less from my place. So after my dad died, my sister started spending even more time visiting with my mom, and eventually my sister and her fiance moved in to my mom's house. This was all according to a plan that the family came up with while my dad was still alive. My sister takes care of my mom, and gets to keep the house when my mom dies. My sister is a nurse, so she is an experienced caregiver, so it made sense. And when my parents kept moving farther south, my sister kept moving to stay near them, so she has been closer to our parents for a long time now.
Taking care of my mom has become hard on my sister this last year. Like some people with Alzheimer's, my mom sometimes becomes very frustrated with her inability to remember things, and starting almost a year ago, she has occasionally gotten violent, either pinching or scratching my sister. Back when she was normal, my mom was a very kind, happy, positive person who never resorted to violence. But she is now at the point where she can still carry on a conversation okay, if it's about stuff that happened years ago. But if I were to ask my mom right now if she had a nice Mother's Day, she wouldn't be able to tell me because she wouldn't remember anything that happened earlier today.
I just talked to my mom and sister a couple of days ago, to see if my sister was holding up okay. She finally sold her house a couple of weeks ago, so she can start paying down her excessive credit card debt and buy a used car to replace the one that died last winter. My sister isn't good with money, and her fiance is kind of lazy and complacent, so he makes lousy money working as a security guard. Fortunately, my mom is getting Social Security, both her own and my dad's checks, plus they had some money saved, and their mortgage was paid off years ago. So between Social Security, Medicare, and savings, my mom isn't costing my sister any money, even though my sister has had to hire a woman and her adult daughter to babysit my mom for 56 hours a week.
In the last few days, my sister and her fiance have both reached out to the rest of the family for help. The first time, they just wanted to send my mom around to the relatives for an extended visit with everybody. We did that last summer, with several people hosting my mom, but my mom ran away three times, and was actually trying to hitchhike home one of those times. She didn't know where she was and just wanted to go home. This time, my sister was thinking of a 2-month visit, but on short notice, nobody can do it, not even me. Then today, my sister left me a message saying that she wants to send my mom to live with me.
I don't think that I can do it. I live alone, and I have a salaried job, which means when times are busy, I work more than 40 hours a week. I have an anger management problem, and the business that I work for is going through a really rough patch for the next two months, where the company could potentially go bankrupt if certain things don't work out. I'm the Director of Finance, so a lot of pressure is on me right now. And my girlfriend is going to a really tough college, so I spend 3-4 nights a week tutoring her and helping her with homework. She has finals right now, and she is taking two tough summer school classes that start soon, Managerial Accounting and Quantitative Analysis. More to the point, I don't have an in-home caregiver lined up, and I'm not a nurse.
And I resent the idea of my sister getting a free house and then sticking me with our mom. That wasn't the deal. She is getting the house in return for taking care of my mom. We both have power of attorney to handle my mom's finances. I haven't responded to my sister yet, and I won't until I have had some time to talk it over with other family members. But I am leaning towards offering my sister a choice: either she continues to care for my mom and gets to keep the house, or we sell the house and use the proceeds to pay for my mom to live in a nursing home.
Am I being unreasonable?