I hate late night emails. When you know it’s going to be bad news, which should you choose, open it then and worry about it all night or decide to open it in the morning and worry about it all night?
So, I opened it in the evening. The financial adviser had apparently decided to side with the lending company and presented their arguments. The two options they were offering were, after doctor’s letters saying exactly how dying my mother was, that they might increase their lending, providing that, if they generously lent me the extra two months they had originally promised, I would immediately afterwards sell the house as quickly as possible. This was a total travesty of all the paperwork they had originally sent me headed ‘Lifetime Mortgage’ which assured me my mother could stay in her house for her lifetime.
Or, we could repay the loan at once including all the early repayment charges, which are punitive, and take out another loan with the same company. Needless to say the only way we can repay the loan is to put my mother in a home and sell the house.
The financial adviser advised me to put my mother in a home as soon as possible.
Fortunately I already had a plan of my own, which has taken some hatching, which is why you haven’t heard from me. After trawling through my mother’s finances with a fine tooth comb I found investments on a yearly pay out in a building society, which cashed in will furnish two month’s care fees. If I add my saved pension and my mother’s remaining saved pension that takes us to three months, past Christmas and into the spring.
Naturally the building society far-flung call centre could not accommodate me even though they have seen the power of attorney, I got told off for using my mother’s password and was quizzed about what I had done with mine. It will be in one of the four drawers and two big boxes here that house her paperwork or it will be in one of two desks in the study at her house if they have posted it to her, or she will have hidden it or thrown it away.
Happily we can do this by post if I fill in a form and she signs it. And there is another letter which I also have to find and fill in for signature and that is definitely at her house somewhere. Because no matter how often you tell people not to post anything important to my mother who is demented and challenged about the post and unreliable with anything that worries her which includes all official letters, including all the begging letters from charities which she receives in sheaves, they still do it.
So the problem may be over if I can find the letter.
So I wrote back to the financial adviser yesterday evening. The OT back from the pub quiz definitely didn’t want to consider the question of the adviser who sides with the enemy. So I went to bed and slept the sleep of one who had worked out all morning and gardened all afternoon. And woke, in agony with a pounding headache, which has finally gone this evening, and the teeth again. I am so glad I have a good dentist and strong implants or I’d be waking with shards of teeth on the pillow.
And then on the phone, my mother was beyond evil about my daughter-in-law. I should have known, she was exactly the same when my son was born. Viciously jealous. This is unfortunate because I’d arranged for the baby to visit my mother tomorrow, with the help of his evil mother, who I now do not wish to subject in any shape or form to my mother.
So it all hinges on tomorrow. If my mother is at all nasty to my daughter-in-law or the baby, that’s it. When she visited me after the S&H was born she was so aggressive and horrible I locked myself in the bathroom with the baby and for the only time in his life my father stood up for me and took her away. I think even he was shocked at how vitriolic she could be.
During the course of my mother’s illness all the people surrounding her have completely polarised. They have either, like her carers, her doctors and very few remaining brave friends, treated her with compassion and kindness as the very sick and elderly person she is, or they have seen her as a helpless person who can be taken advantage of until the money runs out. From my point of view I cannot find one person who has been inconsistent or wavered between good and bad. There is little doubt in my mind that education about dementia for the population generally is desperately needed. People who are demented are still people, they are absolutely not to be objectified as easy income opportunities.
For myself I have never been faced with quite so many moral dilemmas. Sometimes every day for a week I have been battling officialdom to get what belongs to my mother and spend it on her care. I have never asked for a hand-out from anyone at any point. I have never in my whole life had the devil in various disguises whispering in my ear quite as much as recently.
I wrote at the start of dementia diaries that care of a demented and dying person was like a sleigh ride across the frozen tundra under the shadows of the encroaching forest trees filled with the wolf packs galloping ever nearer. The job for the driver, perched precariously on the runners is to keep the demented person in the warm, even if they keep throwing the blankets off, and deliver them to the end in one piece.
Just now the wolves are howling so close, I can feel their breath on my neck.
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