Elderly relative that I don’t know keeps asking for contact details and wants to stay in touch what should I do

[ClairDeLooney]

Looking for a bit of advice.

For context, my mum is in her mid 80’s and very poorly with advanced dementia, she can not communicate well and is housebound. She lives with my elderly father and my sister and I live nearby.

My mum had a small family and very few relatives are still alive. My nan (mum’s mum) had a brother, he married and had a daughter (more about her in a minute), from everything I know about them the brother’s wife was not a nice person, very controlling and domineering. My mum’s uncle died in the street at 50 from a heart attack and my nan never got over it, she always said the wife killed him off with the amount of stress she put under. As a result she had little to do with her sister in law and niece but they always sent letters, Christmas and birthday cards to one another.

The daughter, mum’s cousin, never married and lived with her mother until she passed away in her 90’s a few years ago. When she became frail the cousin took over the Christmas and birthday card writing and would always add in a little letter. However, they never met up and haven’t seen each other since the 1970’s. My sister and I do not know this woman, we have never met her and my dad only met her once at his and mum’s wedding some 50+ years ago.

However, since her mother passed away a a couple of years ago the cousin has been sending more letters on their own as well as in mum’s birthday and Christmas cards, I get the impression the poor woman is lonely, having lived with her mother all her life and now she is in her late 70’s probably regrets not having family and a life of her own.

However, she has started phoning mum and dad’s home line and leaving messages asking dad to call her back for a chat. We have also noticed that in all of her letters of late she keeps asking for both mine and my sister’s addresses and details, she also leaves her telephone number at the top of each letter obviously hoping we will call her. I really feel for this poor lady but she is a complete stranger to me, I have enough to worry about caring for my mum and helping my father (who is 85 and showing signs of dementia himself), I have my own personal issues and family to deal with and as caring and empathetic as I am, I’m not sure if I can take on the issue of another elderly relative. She lives about 30 miles away so not far and the last thing I want is to find her on my doorstep one day.

However, I do feel for her and feel that I should write to her explaining just how bad mum is now (although she is aware because last year dad accidentally answered the phone when she called), I would also like to know why she is so dead set on getting our addresses as we really don’t know her at all.

My dad says we should just leave it but she is not giving up and keeps writing letter a lot these days. I’ve attached the latest and I am concerned about her saying she wants to keep in touch with my sister and I “always” - what the heck does that mean!?

I really feel for the poor lady and would be happy to drop her a letter every now and then if that was all it was but I have too much on my own plate to have to deal with issues of someone I don’t know.

What would you do?

Edited by MNHQ to say we've removed the image as the OP was concerned it might be identifying

Hopefully this lady is also taking steps to make more local friends - she has so many options available although ‘not doing technology’ makes it more difficult for her to find options. She could also be making an effort to befriend neighbours, meet people through church, being a volunteer in a charity shop or other organisation eg a hospice (which my mum did until she was 84), joining a book club, the WI or U3A, joining exercise classes or walking groups, taking up a hobby like painting, writing, knitting or sewing. There are so many options depending on your interests and general health. And then there are befriending services - I just google befriending services and a county I know and got Age UK plus over 10 other befriending services. She could join several - some as a client and some as a volunteer if she is able to give back.

This lady has so many options that she doesn’t or shouldn’t need to lean on two distant relatives who are already giving so much of themselves to their parents.

Thank you. Just to quickly clarify though it's my father who has only met this woman the once, neither my sister or I have ever met her, I don't think I've even seen a photo of her, not one that I recall anyhow. She must have been out enjoying her own life when our mum had us because as far as I know she never once asked to come and visit us as young children and certainly not as adults.

I too work with the elderly and it breaks my heart to see them so lonely and even the ones with children often don't see them for weeks or months on end but I have no idea what they were like as parents, I only see them as older and more vulnerable members of society. Like you say, you get out what you put it. Relationships are like sowing seeds, you have to put in the effort long haul to reap the benefits.

I don't think I can quite bring myself to not reply to the cousin's last letter, I will post on this one letter that I have written but I can't and won't make a habit of being drawn into helping too much simply because I would like a few slivers of time to myself and currently my late 40's/early 50's have been taken up caring and helping, both professionally and personally. I won't live forever and would quite like to spend some quality time with my own family and friends but according to some on here I should give up everything to help this woman because she may just name me in her will - ffs!

Are these the same posters who will rant about female inequality on other threads and how it's dreadful so many women are expected to do everything for everyone? MN is a funny fickle place at times.

I agree, the older people I help in my home help role are all computer savvy and some of them are members of local meet up groups but others refuse to leave the house which is sad. I do notice the ones who go out and join groups appear younger in body and mind than those who don't. I know it's not easy for everyone, I'm quite the introvert myself and am ND but locking yourself away from society is so detrimental to your overall health.

I do feel for her though, if she has been domineered by her mother all these years it's probably very difficult for her and maybe she sees safety in family but we are very much complete strangers.

I've got plenty of good friendships and relationships. But I also have boundaries, and I don't feel obliged to maintain relationships I didn't ask for.

If someone appeared out of the blue that I'd never met before, wanting things from me, I'd be pretty wary as well.

I wouldn’t write to her

As you say 50 years so he whole of her 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, decades and decades not a murmur. Not even that far away.

God just don’t.

She”s after something you can’t provide. Don’t feed this, you will regret it.

Sorry I must have misread! But you don't need to justify yourself to anyone, you're absolutely right to want to spend what little time you have with those you love and cherish. Not expend what little time (and perhaps energy) you have on someone that has not acknowledged your existence in over 50 years.

I raise an eyebrow at those that are calling her your cousin and a "close relative". I have probably close to 70 or even more second cousins. It'd be impossible for me to maintain any close relationships with them and furthermore like you I wouldn't know them at all! But there's people on here who are all "family is everything" who believe you must scrafice yourself at the altar of family, however distant the relation, even if you don't know them or not matter how tenous the relationship and prioritise these people over everything.

Yes she might be lonely and that is sad but that isn't your burden to share or problem to solve. Are you meant to be there for every distant, elderly, lonely relative you don't know? It isn't being cold or heartless but realising that relationships are a two way street. And also you can't pour from an empty cup. This woman has had over 70 years to make connections and a life for herself. She can't reasonably expect after all this time to just descend on some distant relatives she doesn't know and expect them to plug the gaps for her.

I don’t think anyone’s saying the arguments of previous generations are this woman’s fault. But the mere fact you’re talking in those terms suggests you think the OP is somehow blaming/punishing her by not maintaining close contact. I really don’t think she is. OP isn’t cutting this woman out; she was never part of her life in the first place. There’s no need for an olive branch because there was never a falling out between them.

The number of posters wittering on on this thread and piling on the guilt clearly have not even managed to read and take in the first few words of the thread title!

This is someone OP has never met, who has never enquired after her or her sister in her entire life, who has not even met OP's dad since her parents married 50+ years ago. Meanwhile, OP's mum who has also not seen her since the 70s, is in her final stages of dementia and everyone has more than enough on their plate. Not that this badgering woman is showing any signs of respect or concern for the family in this, and is instead badgering them.

An elderly person is hardly likely to travel thirty miles to end up on your doorstep on the off chance you are in.

Like hell. She's 76, which is not elderly for many. I know women in their later 70s, and even late 80s who are regularly whizzing about in their cars. 30 miles would be nothing to them.

Also, why on earth do people imagine it will just be writing "the odd letter" when this woman has already shown how she is likely to proceed by hounding OP's father by phone and answering machine, at this time.

The pestering Aged Dad is prime evidence that she isn't just looking for a once-a-year Christmas card exchange. She wants interaction.

I don't think AT ALL that the OP owes this woman anything - as I said, I think one bland letter and not even an email address would be a perfectly reasonable response.

I would say though that those saying this woman showed no interest when she was younger and so shouldn't be getting in touch now are setting a rather high bar for any relatives to make any contact with other family whatsoever for any reason. I have second cousins I've never met except at weddings and we're not in direct contact, but older generations are so we know about each other and have a rough idea of what's going on in each other's lives. If at any point they became my only remaining family, I would want to stay in touch just because they're family, even if we never actually met up.

Maybe this is something people with large families of 40 or 70 cousins wouldn't understand, but for someone who looks round in their seventies and realises that nearly everyone in their parents or their own generation has gone, it can feel much more important to maintain what threads of connection with family that there are in some small way. Even someone with lots of friends who isn't lonely might have that feeling.

The OP and her sister may actually soon be this woman's closest or only next of kin, and she does not seem to have been abusive towards them or treated them badly in any way, she's just never been in direct contact with them. It's not crazily unreasonable and demanding for her to want to stay in touch, it's really understandable. Even though at the same time I think for the OP's health and sanity it's really important she keeps any contact at a manageable low level.

But she's not just "getting into contact" now. She is hounding OP's father (who she met once in the 1970s) while he is dealing with his wife's final stages of dementia.

She is already behaving in a way that is entitled, crazily unreasonable, selfish, and demanding.

Foul.

I wasn't trying to defend this individual person's behaviour or say the OP owed her anything - that behaviour is precisely why the OP would be reasonable to keep any contact minimal.

I was responding to the idea that anyone (in any family) who has not been direct contact ("shown an interest") for their whole adult life with every individual member of their extended family forfeits the right to contact those family members later.

That's just not how communication between branches of many families works. the OP's family seems not unusual in that the parents' generation and older did the communicating for decades and now that those original links have weakened or broken, someone is trying to establish a link with the younger generation, so the branches stay in touch. I can't see that as a bad thing in principle.

What the OP herself does is clearly going to still depend on what this woman is like, what the demands on her own time are, etc., but that's different from the general idea of trying to keep some thread of contact going being unreasonable.

My mum's cousin's daughter - a good twenty years my senior - asked for my address so that we could exchange Christmas cards.

We've done that for a few years now.

But just trying to keep some thread of contact going does not require hounding.

There is no such thing as karma, which is just as well for you.

Maybe she wants your addresses to add you in her will. You’re clearly the only family she has.

If that is the case she could do it via OP’s parents - the legal team could easily find her from that

And she’s not family, she’s a relative who’ve never had anything to do with each other.

Yes she could and yes I’m aware of your points. I’m just saying, that may be the reason she wants addresses.

Social services will not expect you to care for an elderly person you haven’t met but would consult any family that a person has before taking on an deputyship of finances if that person cannot do it themselves.

Ok, then how do you explain the fact that she's been hounding the OP's father who isnt well himself, constantly ringing and leaving messages asking him to ring her back? OP's dad is 85 with the beginnings of dementia himself and has even told OP he doesnt want to speak to her.

Do you think that sounds like a person who isnt looking for anything more than a yearly Christmas card? did you even bother to read that bit?

As for the loneliness twaddle - not wanting to be hassled when you are ill by some random woman who hasn't bothered with you for the last 50 years does not mean you are going to be eternally lonely for the rest of your life.

Good grief.

Maybe OP could give you her details and you could contact her. After all she’s a stranger to both of you. Would mean less time berating others on mumsnet, but think of the karma !

But the OPs cousin has surely had 70+ years to realise she's in a small family and make those connections. Family relationships are like all relationships in that maintain time and effort. From what the OP says, this distant cousin hasn't shown any interest in her in over 50 years. Now suddenly the OP is being guilted into sending letters and maintaining contact with someone who hasn't acknowledged her in decades.

People whining and wailing about this cousin having no family only seem to be seeing it from the point of view from a sad old lonely person. This cousin has been completely absent from helping the OPs mum when she was a parent, being a family presence for the OP when she was growing up, supporting the OP with her own ND kids and now supporting the OP with her parents who have dementia.

I'm astounded that people think it's the OP is being heartless. It doesn't matter what the cousins back story is. She's family in name only, it doesn't mean anything if you've not acknowledged someone's existence for 50 years. You get in life what you put in.

I don't think people on here realise how emotionally and physically caring for someone like dementia is. Or for ND children. Maintaining a relationship or even sending a letter is expending energy that someone people just don't have. This cousin is not owed anything from the OP at all.