No Help, No Solution

I've been meaning to write about my mom, but everytime I start...I can't seem to find a way to explain it. Because you're busy with your young adult lives and there's really no way to help you to understand what it feels like to watch this happen to your mother. Now we all know that my mother and I have had lifelong differences; she's a difficult, stubborn woman prone to childish grudges and far too concerned with what the world thinks about her...but, she is my mother. Sometimes, secretly, I think that she deserves this because it seems an extension of her pre-dementia self. Why would we have thought that there was a different ending in store for her? When it all started I had hoped that, perhaps, this would change her into a sweet old lady, dutifully hanging on to one of us as we helped her get from car to restaurant or grocery store . "Thank you, dear!" she would have said with a sweet, loving smile as she gracefully accepted each act of love we would give to her. Thus, we would feel good that we were doing our duty as children and returning a gift to her that she had given to us during our lives. She would hold our grandchildren, laugh and play with them and give their young minds pleasant memories of a great-grandmother to take into their futures long after she is gone. Ah, that's a nice dream. But perhaps in order to end your life like that you need to have lived it like that. Maybe, maybe not. I suppose nothing is guaranteed. Based on the stories that Cindy and I hear from friends and professionals alike, this type of thing is quite common. 'I went through that with my mother/grandmother/father....' The maddening thing is that no one can help because SHE won't let it happen. She refuses our help, after all, we are stealing her things and her money, so she can't let us into her apartment. She refuses social worker's help; she insists that she her memory is fine and if only someone would stop stealing her things all would be well in the world. She will not allow us or any county service to merely call her daily to remind her to take her pills. "I'm fine! I can remember!" Yet when one of does get in to see her none have been taken for days. She calls the police, the landlord and before we disabled her car, she visited the bank several times a week looking to find her lost money. She insists my sister took $20,000 off of her dining room table the last time she was there. This week she told me her bicycle had a flat tire; she has no bicycle, but her car has a flat. She has been visited by the county office on aging and the state police and the mental health professionals. No one can help.
She has her rights, they say, and she doesn't want to leave. One finally told me this week that we'd just have to wait for a crisis to happen. How comforting. Stubborn? Oh yes. That's my mother.