Pls LMK if there is a more specific sub I can be using. Sorry this got long.
TLDR - I have concerns about my grandmas ability to live alone but I don’t know what (if any) grounds I have to do anything about it. Or if I’m overreacting.
My grandma is ~ 85 and my aunt is her POA. My grandma has AFIB and also supposedly dementia. I say supposedly because that’s part of the problem, no one seems to know if she actually does or doesn’t, including my aunt who goes to her doctor appointments. Grandma also has a walker, she can get around without it but not great.
Grandmas house is disgusting. She shoves garbage (wrappers, tissues) in random corners, doesn’t wash her sheets (there appears to be feces on them regularly), her bathroom wall usually has feces on it, the floor gets so sticky you can see the layer of filth over the linoleum. It’s GROSS. My mom goes over about once a week now to clean so she isn’t living in filth. She refuses a maid service and says if one comes she’s not going to open the door.
Grandma lived alone up until ~ 3 years ago when my cousin (let’s call her Jane) moved in. Grandma had a few falls so the one thing my mom and her 3 siblings seem to agree on is that she can’t live alone, but Jane is awful and is rarely home. Jane screams at her all the time. Jane is supposed to be helping with taking garbage out, cooking, cleaning, etc but is pretty much a free loader and has destroyed grandmas house with her two cats that piss everywhere.
NOW: FOOD. The biggest point of contention right now. My mom is in charge of ordering her groceries every week. But she does not use ANY of them. She’ll ask her to order stuff for a meatloaf or stew, she doesn’t cook it, and it all goes bad. My mom even gets her stuff like muffins, fruit, juice, yogurt that SHE ASKS FOR, that don’t require cooking, and she doesn’t eat it. She’ll text my mom saying she doesn’t have any food and ask her to door dash McDonalds for breakfast. For dinner almost every night she orders delivery over the phone and pays with checks for this local pizza place. My aunt handles her $$ and she’s given ~ $500 in cash every month, my aunt said by the middle of the month she’s writing checks for pizza delivery.
My mom throws out ~ $150 worth of groceries every week. Grandma will text her like “I made the meatloaf, it was delicious!” Or if she tells my mom she’s hungry and needs McDonald’s, my mom says “You have XYZ”, she’ll say she ate it already, but she didn’t. When she’s confronted about it she just says she didn’t know the food was there. If my mom says she isn’t ordering more of something because she already has it, grandma screams at her. Sometimes my mom calls me crying afterwards out of pure exhaustion. She wouldn’t even admit to ordering the pizzas when confronted until my mom and aunt teamed up and told her they see the checks.
She refused meals on wheels because she was “embarrassed” but finally my mom and aunt signed her up anyway. It started Monday and she lied to my mom that they didn’t come and said she needed a McDonald’s breakfast.
No one seems to know WHY she does these things. Can she physically / mentally not clean or cook bc of dementia? Does she actually think she’s cooking and making the meatloafs, stews etc? Does she actually not know the food is there? Is she just old and lazy and wants to eat her McDonald’s and pizza all day and doesn’t care if she lives in filth? She’s losing weight, she lost so much weight last time I saw her that none of her clothes fit and I guess she won’t let my mom buy her new ones, she says she doesn’t have the money (when she def does).
My aunt says she doesn’t think she really has dementia and she’s just being difficult because that’s how she is, my mom doesn’t seem to know what to think. My aunt says she lies to the doctors during appointments so they think she has it. My mom can’t do anything about this because my aunt is the POA. They all hate eachother and it’s rare that my mom and her siblings actually talk let alone agree on anything. I just feel like if she’s actually being difficult and doesn’t really have dementia, my mom should just stop caring so much about whether or not she eats the groceries and if she wants to be dirty. Or if she is truly physically and mentally incapable of taking care of herself then isn’t it sort of considered elder abuse to let her live like that when she can’t make decisions for herself??? Shouldn’t there be a point where they say she needs to go to a home or needs help?
My aunt has all the power and doesn’t want to send her to a nursing home because grandma would have to sell her home and Jane wouldn’t have a place to live. My aunt doesn’t seem to care that Jane doesn’t do shit to help and just tells my mom that if she doesn’t want grandma to live in filth she can go clean. My mom’s other two siblings refuse to even talk about the issue and don’t even go see grandma.
I hate hearing my mom vent about this. I feel like if I were her, I’d call the state and see if there’s a social worker or something that can take over and manage this. I hate thinking of my grandma starving or wasting all that food, I hate thinking about her living in her own shit, I hate Jane freeloading and not helping. There has to be a better way. I’m in my early 20s and have no experience with this so I’m not sure when it’s time to draw the line and how to even do that if the POA doesn’t care.
Advice ?
