I still have both parents. It's terrifying to think of losing them, even though Im not that close with them.

@whowasthatmaskedman
For what it's worth, I had a friendly admirer who was 92 years old when I first met him and 98 years old when he couldn't keep up with me anymore.

When he was 50 years old, he and his wife started a long term care facility in their small town and then ran it for the next 40 years. Eventually, he and his wife ended up living in that same LTC facility, mainly because as you say, dementia made his wife impossible for him to handle on his own in their home.

So, they both moved in together at their LTC facility and shared a double room together until she passed. Then, being the cheap basturd that he said he was, he moved himself into a 4-bed ward-room down the hall because he no longer needed all the space that 340 square feet could offer him.

For those 40 years, he and his wife and a small nursing staff looked after the elderly in town who had vascular dementia or Alzheimers and never thought anything of it until his own wife was diagnosed with vascular dementia.

Despite his 40 years of hands-on training in dealing with this disease, everything he had learned was suddenly useless to him because his wife got to the point he said, where she was impossible to deal with in their home. She was driving him out of his mind and he couldn't stand it anymore.

So, he made the phone call and two men wearing white coats came across the street to their house and escorted his wife over to the business that she herself had created with my friend 40 years earlier and assigned her to a room. She didn't even recognize where she was at the end of the hall, despite designing the very room herself that they had assigned to her that day.

A few days before he passed at the age of 98, my friendly admirer called me to come and visit him and when I got there I found that his mind was still very sharp and his body was still pretty good too, though he walked with a walker in his last year on earth.

He told me during that visit that if he had known 45 years earlier that he'd be living in that god forsaken place, he would have made the ceilings higher and the hallways wider because the facility was simply way too close for comfort with so darn many "old people hanging around all the time and never leaving!" he said.

Speaking of leaving, he told me that he himself would be leaving in just 3 days from then and wanted me to be the first one to know before the nurses found him lying on his bed with his tongue hanging out of his mouth, though there was nothing physically wrong with him.

I told him he was full of shittt, that he was not leaving and he agreed with me for once ..and then ask me what my point was?

Three days later when I showed up for a surprise visit, mainly just to prove him wrong, he had already passed away earlier that same morning, about 45 minutes before I arrived there.

To do what you and your wife did in your home with your own relatives was very noble of you and your wife as well and was certainly the right thing to do at the time, though undoubtedly was hard on the family life. But always know in the back of your mind if ever you were second-guessing yourself about any of it, that you could not have made that whole experience any better in any way, shape or form, even if you somehow were given another opportunity to do it all over again, perhaps the right way this time ..or perhaps a much better way this time.

That's what I learned from a guy who knew more about this sort of thing than anyone else could have ever possibly learned in a lifetime of trying to care-give someone with dementia, while attempting to do it the right way the first time.

@swirlie I am getting to the point where I am going to talk more about my experiences. Another month or so when things are a little less hectic. But thanks for sharing, Till then..😷

@whowasthatmaskedman
Sure! Looking forward to it! 🙂