My Dad has dementia. Mum was in hospital over Christmas 2015 and died just after New Year 2016. It has been a struggle but Dad is still in his own home. I moved in with him for several months while I got care sorted. It was difficult as he lives in a rural area where services are restricted but now with a mix of private and social care he has 4 visits a day and I go up every weekend.
It is a one hour drive for me, on a good day, so a two hour round trip on a very windy steep country road on which there are fatalities every year. I do all the work to support Dad living independently from sorting out the wonky rayburn and whatever else has gone wrong in the impractical old cottage that he loves and doesn’t want to leave, to organising a pension for his private carers. His needs are relentless and the only way for me to cope was to drop to 4 days a week at work. My career has been side lined and I am watching people much younger than me with half the experience being promoted. It is impacting my current income and will reduce my stakeholder pension. It also means I have to give up any hope of retiring before I am 67.
I am single. I have a brother. He lives 500 miles away so is limited in what he can do, he is married and has two adult children both in their 20s, i.e. has other calls on his time. This year he came up for a weekend in February, a weekend in May and a week at Christmas. So 7 months from May to December without even a suggestion he might visit. He forgot Dad’s birthday in September.
Dad had a really bad time mid December with his bowels. I had to stay over to launder a huge number of shitty sheets, clean the liberally smeared bathroom, pick turds off the bedroom floor, help Dad put on incontinence pads and try to persuade him to put used pads in a waste bag not just leave them lying around his bedroom and bathroom. He is not usually incontinent he just needed the pads while we were trying to stabilise his bowel movements after several enemas.
I got very behind with Christmas prep because of this but didn’t sweat the small stuff like Christmas cards. There were however two presents that really mattered to friends of Dad’s who provide company to him throughout the year. I was run ragged the last Saturday I was up there and didn’t manage to get these delivered but thought I could ask my brother to do it as he was there for a week and SIL and one of his kids joined him for five days. I thought between the three of them they would manage to deliver a couple of presents to people who have been very good to Dad through the year and live within walking distance.
I asked my brother twice to do this, once by email and again when I saw them all on Christmas Eve. They didn’t do it. He said he forgot. He does nothing all year. I know he is far away and can’t do the horrid shitty emergency things but the very least he could do is remember the small things that make a difference like Dad’s birthday and delivering a couple of presents.
I am so angry, I sent a series of very nasty, extremely sweary emails. I’m sure he thinks it is a disproportionate response. But it matters because these are the people who provide Dad with the company that he doesn’t, these are the people that help me when he doesn’t, and he couldn’t even get off his arse for a short time to say thank you to them. It all seems part of his general disinterest and non-involvement. I recognise I am bitter and resentful and some of the anger is mixed up with the awfulness of Mum’s illness and death at this time in 2015 when again he was pretty much absent. But why does he get to be so fucking idle, feckless and uncaring? Why does he get to retire at 60 on a comfortable civil service pension when caring for Dad has pushed back my retirement and will reduce my provision? Is it because as an unmarried female my quality of life is less important than his because that is what it fucking feels like. What can you do with absent relatives to make them step up?