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Smc
Senior Contributor

Holding the ends together

Hey Peoples.

Thinking I might move on from my original thread. Given it's long since turned out that Older Daughter's diagnosis at that time was incorrect, and honestly, life as a carer is more complicated than just caring for her. "Holding the ends together" feels like a lot of what it is, so that'll do.

@Determined @Faith-and Hope @Shaz51 ... and might tag in others over time, but will start with you guys, cos' you're the "long haul" ones. xx

89 REPLIES 89

Re: Holding the ends together

Sooo... unfortunately I'm kicking this off with a big bunch of "ends" that I've been sitting on for the past week or two, because they're big ends.

End One- Hubby's Mum died a bit over a week ago. Her funeral is happening this coming Thursday down in the Big City. Her health has been deteriorating for a long time, but Hubby's Dad was able to care for her at home up until the last week of her life. We were able to visit her in hospital during that week. She was very frail and tired, but still coherent. We possibly visited her on the last day she was awake enough to talk with us. We've been able to see for a while that she was heading toward "taking her leave of us", so it wasn't a shock, but still a lot to deal with. She was much loved by all of us.

It's odd, we've spent so much of the past 10 years or so knowing we were in line to be dealing with one or another family member's funeral at any time unknown, but up until maybe a month ago, we weren't expecting hers to be the first.

End Two- someone broke into my parents house... Y'know, unoccupied house 400 kms away. That was discovered by a cousin of mine on Saturday when she and her husband went around there to mow the naturestrip. And we can't do a thing about going there until after this week is over, and even then, we'll have to somehow treat ourselves gently. I should be ringing the police to report it, but am finding it hard getting my head around doing that. My sister and the two of us are racking our brains trying to work out how to finish dealing with the things we still want out of their house so we can sell it and get it off our minds, but none of us have the money to cover any of the "easier" solutions.

End Three... is a smaller one but still vital. Car trouble with the radiator, and Hubby's the only driver to get five our our family down to the city for the funeral. Sounds like there's a decent chance it will be fixed in time, but that's a complication we didn't need ATM.

Re: Holding the ends together

Sending you lots of tender hugs my @Smc 

Soo sorry to hear about your MIL โคโคโค

Hope the care is fixed in time xxx

And sorry to hear about your parents house xx

Re: Holding the ends together

So @Smc. All of this stuff is happening but how are you holding up?  

 

It sounds like you have some decisions to make and decisions that involve family can get complicated when values differ.  It sounds like time to yourself for downtime is hard at the moment, Are you managing to get some time to go for a walk or just do you? In this period, it might just be the little thing you take for yourself that gives you the strength to be there for others. 

Re: Holding the ends together

@AussieRecharger, treating myself as gently as possible in the circumstances. Both Hubby and myself are finding we're very "scatterbrained" and losing our train of thought easily. Both kinda flat and stressed at the same time, and I'm not sleeping well. My "self care" time is generally getting out in the garden, or online relax time.

We've needed to do things like hunting down some photos- there was one in particular we wanted that we couldn't find. It was a both a relief and a bit sad when I found it, because I'd put it with some important paperwork relating to my Dad when he was the very unwell one a year or so ago, and we thought we might be organising his funeral. Hubby needs to put together a eulogy, but his Dad is organising the majority of the funeral details.

The emptying and selling of my Mum and Dad's house isn't a clash of values problem. Both my sister and I want it off our minds, but my main reason for being on the forum is our Older Daughter's severe, long term and uncertainly-diagnosed MI. She's adult, doesn't live with us, but does sometimes need high level support from us. We've been supporting her through multiple SA and SH incidents (literally hundreds of) plus other mental health issues and physical (?) health problems (which may or may not be psychological in origin, or "amplified" by her MI- we literally don't know).

My sister lives near us, but works full time, so we've all been trying to juggle in little opportunities to make that 400k trip to visit our parents and sort their house. And it wasn't a tidy house... very full house, very full shed. Probably could have more or less furnished 3-4 houses with what's there. So the problem is it's a mammoth task, and very little spare time and energy available for it. All three of us (self, Hubby, sister) are struggling with varying degrees of depression and anxiety, so Mum and Dad's house gets tackled in little 4-5 day bites. By that point, we're all so burnt out that we need to head home. And these "bites" have become less frequent over time, because it was wearing us down beyond our limits.

Just the logistics of moving the things we want to keep gets complicated when it's such a distance. We should be able to hire a truck, but when it's that far away, you can't get a hire truck at their end and return it to the same franchise at our end. They want you to drive it back to where you got it from. So we want to make sure that we've got everything that needs to come down this way ready to go in one truckload, but there are parts of Dad's big shed that we haven't even been able to sort through yet. Once we can get to them, I think the "keep or not" decisions will be fairly straightforward. It's the getting there that's hard. (The shed is packed almost solid. The walkways filled up as Dad got older, and both his body and his memory started to fail him.)

Re: Holding the ends together

@Smc 

 

You have a lot of good strategies for getting stuff down.  Do you know anyone else who you might be able to ask for help?  That seems to be the only factor I am seeing here is that you all are trying to tackle it between yourself.  Is there a local lifeline/ Mens shed etc that you could engage to help you get rid of stuff that you don't want but they could find useful?

Re: Holding the ends together

@AussieRecharger, yeah, that's where we run into problems. We've only got a few personal connections up that end, and they're mostly aging family members and friends. We'd have a better network here, via friends in town, church and suchlike, but Mum and Dad's place is too far away for getting their help. We were originally thinking big garage sale; then thinking maybe try to sell a bit at a time whenever we were up there. But we realised our visits were too short to comfortably organise sales, and also, that would be like waving a flag saying the house was being emptied and might be a good target for thieves.

There's local op shops and bric-a-brac type shops that we might be able to pass on/sell on some things to. We've already brought most of the collectables and some craft goods and books back here with the intention of selling those. I hate throwing things out that still have a useful purpose (feels financially and environmentally wrong!) but we may not have any other option with a lot of the ordinary household stuff. A lot of op shops down this end have stopped taking donations at the moment because they've been getting too much, and I suspect it might be the same there. Some of the smaller shops closed down during lockdowns because it was too expensive to cover shop rental, so the remaining ones are getting lots of/too many donations.

At the moment, Hubby and I are wanting to blitz through our house, get rid of furniture and "stuff" that we don't really need or want to make room for the things we do want out of Mum and Dad's house... but that's mostly delayed for now until the funeral and the trip up there to check the damage have happened.

Re: Holding the ends together

Totally understand my friend xx @Smc 

It was a shame that your parents house was broken into  as you can leave it and attend  to the sorting out later when you and your sister needs too xoxo

One step at a time xxx 

Re: Holding the ends together

@Smc thinking of you and family ๐Ÿ™

 

Re: Holding the ends together

And like the new thread idea, the title says sooo much. 

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