I’m going to start a new series of articles about caring for my mom. She’s 80 and recently moved to Oregon and into assisted living. I plan to write a weekly article about what happened that week, or didn’t happen, and how I’m dealing with it all mentally. I’m here to tell you, the systems we have in place are complex, confusing, and not all that great.
It’s stressful, and it’s time consuming. Mostly, though, it consumes my mental energy. Like the bad days at work, most days where I have to deal with the system suck. That said, there are bright spots, and I’m going to talk about those too.
A Bit of Background
My mom won’t be reading this, so I can be pretty open, I think……..but there might be things I don’t share. We’ll see as we go along. In any event, my mom is 80. She looks like a little old lady, with her back all bent from not standing up straight and other things. She’s not super strong. She couldn’t really drive anymore (might do a whole post on that), and one of her friends in MN was spending a TON of time helping us/her.
But none of that is why we moved her to Oregon (where my wife and I live). We did because she has dementia. I mean, we did also want to relieve the stress and work on her friend, but I think we might have found a place in MN if she didn’t have dementia. All of her friends are in MN, though more and more were dying, or moving out of MN, or just not spending time with my mom anymore. It was time to move her. She remembers to eat, bathe, and mostly daily stuff, but not to take her meds. She can’t remember much of anything that isn’t playing bridge or daily routine things.
I did suggest someone come into her apartment every day to help with meds, but she had no interest in that for some reason.
I’ll do a lot more on dementia as we go, because it is 100% difficult to deal with. And people might want to know there are others in the same boat…..but for now, that’s the background we need in the intro post.
Conclusion for this Post
I plan to keep these posts relatively short. I thought about a newsletter, but I have like 8 followers, so that’s silly. Maybe this way someone will find these posts. I mean, expect the posts to be longer than this, but this is mostly a placeholder post for the background stuff.
The next posts will be about finding her a place to live, and a post on Friday about the week.
If anyone reads this, and has good free resource suggestions, send them to me here or on Bluesky (which is likely where you heard about this series).