Posting for some much needed advice.
My parents are not elderly by any stretch (early 60s) but my father is not in the best health (not severely ill but a myriad of milder health issues that will no doubt culminate in worsening health - think diabetes, obesity etc) and my mother is old before her time.
My mother is the main issue here. She still works part time but if you never knew this you’d think she was a vulnerable old lady the way she goes on. She has a helplessness, probably wilful as opposed to learned and is totally reliant on my father for pretty much everything - organising life admin, cooking, sorting things like cars etc). When not at work she sits at home watching made for TV movies that I think affect how she thinks the real world actually is. As a result everything is over dramatised in her head and in some cases I think she actually invents stories for attention. She has no friends and no hobbies. Suggestions are met with excuse after excuse about why she can’t do something. She will say things like, ‘when your dad goes’ 🧐 and outlines her plans for when she assumes she will outlive him. I am not joking.
Recently my father has had to have surgery on his knee. Despite her being a fully capable adult, this somehow resulted in us (her adult children who all live a minimum 1.5hrs away) being manipulated into doing things for her she was more than capable of doing herself whilst he was in hospital. It gave me a very real look into the future and it filled me with dread. My siblings both have children and as the one who doesn’t, I can see the burden of this falling to me and it is not sustainable. The weeks before my father was up and more mobile and back to his old self where some of the most mentally draining of my life and this was a non-life threatening medical issue.
For those of you who have been there what should we be doing now to better prep her for the possibility future? Especially given that I don’t think she will take it on board and she is the sort of person that views any constructive criticism as a personal attack.