My mom lives in one state and I live in another. I have spoken to an attorney w/in the state where I live and they probably will accept the POA & health care proxy. I do have POA & a health care proxy. She has been diagnosed w/ dementia and diminished capacity in health and finances. She is spending thousands of dollars on scams on the phone and by mail. I've tried repeatedly to say they are just scams, but she is convinced she has won millions of dollars. She takes many many pills for depression and anxiety. She usually takes them ahead of schedule and then wonders why she doesn't have them at the end of the month. So she drinks& buys any pills from "friends". Then she gets her bills and she says she didn't buy these items . So then all of her credit cards give her credit on hundreds of dollars of stuff she says she doesn't have but actually they are in her house somewhere. She has had nine different checking accounts in the last 19 months. She barely eats and is occasionally in the hosp for UTI and other misc problems. I need to put her in a locked safe facility so I can sell her house ( which she has taken out a loan on to pay for her scam habit) and take care of all the other issues. Are there places who will take her even though she will kick and scream that she shouldn't be there? She is driving but absolutely shouldn't be. She has hit three handicap poles and two mail boxes in the past three weeks. She also has hit someone's car and I'm trying to find the paperwork ( that she has hidden). Please help. She 1000 % will not go willingly. :(
If you have all the legal authority you need to act, then you must act. First of all, get mom off the streets. Ask her doctor to notify the DMC that she is no longer safe to drive. If the doctor won't then you must do it. Sell Mom's car.
Take over her checking account. Move all but a small amount of money out of it and have any of her auto-deposit checks deposited into a new account that you control on her behalf. Any large checks she writes on the old account will bounce.
Start searching for a suitable care center. Ideally it is one that can serve her needs now and also in the future. If Mom may not have enough to live on for the long term, try to find a place that will accept Medicaid when her money runs out. Would it be better to find such a place where she is now, or to move her closer to you?
There is a huge amount for you to do. Many decisions to be made. Hang in there! You will get through this! Can you spend time in your mother's area while you are working this all out?
Here is something to keep firmly in mind: This is Not Your Fault. That you don't know instinctively how to handle it is Not Your Fault. You have enough on your mind. Don't let guilt in there, too!
Are you in touch with social services in your mother's area? Make friends with them. They and your mother's doctor may be invaluable reinforcements, as well as important sources of information and advice.
The guardian can decide what kind of living situation is best for the ward and then implement it. Many of think that if you can do that with some trickery and lying, that is often better than doing it by having the sheriff's office forcibly take the ward to the new living setting.
A guardian is absolutely responsible for the ward's well-being. If protective measures can be accomplished by persuasion, so much the better. But if the ward does not agree to having most of her money put into an account she cannot access, it has to be done anyway. If she doesn't want to give up driving, it is still necessary for her to be kept off the road.
A guardian has much more power than a POA -- and much greater accountability. It would be negligent to allow Mother to continue to spend her money on scams, for example.
Doublefeelings, can you tell us once more if you were appointed guardian by a court?
You can have mom's mail diverted to a PO box, in addition to the steps that Jeanne so wisely outlined.
No. No, that's not what they're for.
How can I put this delicately and sympathetically... How much of your mother's oppositional attitude, do you think, is irrationality/dementia, and how much of it pre-existing?
How much of her behaviour is dementia, and how much drug dependency?
Let me give you a couple of examples of why I'm finding it difficult to understand how incapacitated your mother is, as opposed to just a heck of a handful in general.
Wanting to attend a future event, in a way that is so reasonable that you agree that it takes priority over getting the ball rolling. Well, both that kind of planning ahead and her being part of that kind of social network... these are not things one associates with progressing dementia.
Waiting until you're asleep before she nips out to buy her drugs, and coming back mission accomplished. Again, that's rational planning and effective execution. It doesn't sound very demented.
Less delicately, I would say that your elder attorney's advice - perhaps out of context it sounds worse than it is, I don't know - sucks.
You *are* going behind your mother's back. You *are* lying to her. You are conspiring to have her removed from her home and her city and her life without any regard *at all* for her longstanding preferences or current wishes. No wonder you're exhausted, and no wonder you dread her becoming aware of what you really have in mind.
Your mother sounds like more than a handful. You need help with her. But this current approach is not only a living nightmare, it is also all over the place ethically. Contact APS and her GP and work with them on a care plan. Speak to them first of all without consulting your mother about it, do it in confidence by all means, but get their input and advice. Don't stalk, kidnap and imprison your mother, tell her it was for her own good, and then expect it all to turn out fine in the end.
IF guardianship has already been assigned, then it isn't up to us to judge how demented or how competent Mother is. The courts have already seen to that.
It is a little confusing that Doublefeelings didn't mention guardianship in her original post.
The guardian has legal control over where the adult lives and over all their resources. The court, of course, has authority over the guardian to judge if things done were appropriate to the situation. It may be that your mother only needs assisted living and an allowance. No checks, no charge cards. Just an allowance. The guardian or conservator needs to be paying the bills and doing all the legal things.
I am so lost reading all of this, because the laws are really simple when it comes to guardianship. The question should be what is an appropriate place for your mother and how much allowance should she receive, since you have guardianship.
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