I couldn't see where else to post this so it's posted here...
I'll try to cut a very long story short but I'm afraid it will still be long...I'm trying to help my mother and need any advice or experience you can share...
I hope this makes sense, in writing it I realise how much desperation and emotion I feel. It's a life story I've never told , or a fraction of the life story and is very hard to write coherently.
My mother is late in her 60's, but is in poor physical health,with substantial hearing loss (doesn't use hearing aid as apparently none can help her
and is therefore very isolated. She has a lot of physical health issues and limps about with a very curved spine. She can barely make it through the day, she is so exhausted. She has the most awful sustained uncontrollable cough and if I stay at her house, I can hardly bear to hear her coughing at night,totally out of control. She laughs it off if I bring it up, or go to her day or night. I've had so many gentle talks, angry talks, tearful talks, she just denies and walks away.
Her saving grace is an iron strength determination and inner fierceness. I have suspected tumours for a long time but she will not have any tests, she becomes utterly deaf if I try to talk about health checks of any sort. 20 years ago I made several appointments with therapists but she either didn't go or walked out. She has had a violent and alcoloholic history but has not been agressive nor alcolholic for about ten years, at least not in action, if in thought.
She remarkably self cured from alcoholism, a process which as a teenager, in the months before my father's death, I witnessed as nothing short of a miracle.
I must say, without wanting to self pity ourselves ( my two great bros and I) , our childhood and teen years were extremely hard going. Perhaps as a teenage woman, I saw, heard and dealth with more then them, and I've never brought certain things up with them, another form of protecting others.
Mum makes it outside most days, and her contact with the world is the community with in she has lived for 45 years but has no friends as such, nor helpful neighbours. The area, once bohemian, is now extremely affluent and she loves the fact that she lives with streetfulls of film star this and presenter that but there is no-one around to help her, no basic decent community help. My father died 20 years ago. She lives alone in our family home which has a high prime location London market value and which is huge, absurdly expensive to run and needs 500k spending on it to become a comfortable home again. She rarely turns the heating on because she can't pay the bills which does not help her repeated bouts of bronchitis ("What smoking darling?" doesn't help either).
I phoned her Dr a couple of years ago to urge him not to just keep giving her repeated prescriptions of antibiotics which she self diagnoses for and which get left on reception but to insist on an appointment with her, to listen to her lungs and heart and make an assessment. I told her she smokes heavily and he said, "Well her file has Ex Smoker stamped on it so that's the truth because that's what she told me". I expressed my horror at his passive attitude and he laughed it off. He told me that he has many patients with suspected tumours and there's nothing he can do if they don't ask for checks. This is honestly what he ACTUALLY SAID. My blood boils when I think about this. As a GP, are you not attending to the communitie's health issues? Are you not responsible for the handing out of drugs and the viability for the treatment? I wasn't asking him to force her against her will, simply to care a little and ask himself, What is going on here? Let's see Mrs *** and have a chat, gently suggest a few good things."
She is totally and utterly broke, no money to buy food or to pay the bills.She's been surviving on scouring the supermarkets at 5.50pm when they mark every thing down to 20p due to Sell By Date. She has grown accustomed and thinks nothing of eating sandwiches etc that she keeps for a week or more beyond the sell by date. I feel so desperately horrified about this. It's awful. She won't listen to any sense and her sense of economy has become lodged deeply in this utterly skint and unpleasant existence.
She's been spending life insurance money from my father's death, living in the totally inappropriate house over the years when it could have lasted a long long time in a nice renovated garden flat, with people to attend to her every need, or to be alone if she prefers. Ok, so it's her choice but she hasn't worked for 40 odd years and is too ill to do so. My two brothers and I are helping her out but with young children of our own we cannot manage to raise the kind of money she needs to stay there and she really needs to face the issue, rather than get rescued from other people's pockets. She wants to put the house on the market in Spring, as she is adamant that it won't sell now, or if it does she will take a 'massive' price drop. She may be right, but the situation seems life threatening to me (she's fallen twice and shattered one arm/elbow/wrist with major surgery and loss of range of movement resulting). She is so utterly utterly stubborn about absolutely everything and has been obviously mentally borderline for most of our lives, though never diagnosed. She's quite sane on many levels (she can think straight) and quite totally nuts on others (imagination goes wild, esp living on own and very obsessive personality (COD), inability to hear, not just on the physical hearing level, totally immersed in herself).
My brothers and I have been trying to get her out of her house for 20 years. She can have everything she could wish for and more if she would only sell. She has 'sold' or nearly 'sold' several times, pulling out due to sellers remorse. I doubt that she will ever move out of the house, or that we would have to take power of attorney in order to take control, which is an awful awful thought.
She is however certain that she will put the house on the market in Spring, but she's been saying that for years, gets everything ready, works like mad on every single perfect little alignment of pots and china (in 22 rooms) before she'll allow the viewings/valuations and then pulls out when it gets really interesting.
I want to help her to release some kind of credit on the house but she has absolutely no income. She also wants to release some credit (enough for a year of living there, to see through the sale and no more).
She is now telling me that it's not possible, no-one wants to lend. She makes up a lot of stuff, down to the detail so it's hard to tell what's happenned and what's a figment of her imagination.
I realise the bit below is perhaps for another section of the forum. I'll go in search of money matters...
Surely there is some kind of mortgage possibility available based on the value of the house for someone without income, especially when it's a tiny tiny percentage of the value? Perhaps her age is the problem, no-one wants to lend? She does already have a loan, which my father was encouraged to take out before he died, but which had no insurance attached so Mum inherited it. Poor financial management. She pays the interest on it every month but has no more money to do so.
If she gave the house to my brother (38, architect, self employed but with successful own start up practice) then maybe he could borrow the money for her? I doubt she would do this because she's so mentally stuck but who knows now that she is finally utterly skint. We all have a close (if painfully exhausted exhasperated relationship) and my brothers and I are resolute in helping her, I must say to great cost on my brother's marriages. I live abroad and see her rarely but we are very much in touch by phone although that is getting harder, now that she can hardly hear. She talks, I listen, then we have to hang up because she can't hear me.
I"m thinking, who, where, what can I contact for help, to get some money released for her on the value of her house. On the health level, I don't know, some kind of assessment was due a long long time ago, but is certainly not welcome by her. I really don't know what to do.