Dementia Sibling Wars

Family caregiving sometimes brings out the worst in families. It's hardly ever totally easy even with everyone on the same page.

Imagine then that some of these scenarios were going on in your caregiving family. If they aren't, then you are already far better off than you thought.

I'm going to set aside the obvious pictures of inadequacy. The errant son who comes home to barely take care of Dad, while running that little methamphetamine lab out in the garden shed. Clearly, everyone knows that's bad.

It's when you get to white-collar caregiver bad-hats that the age-old battle of siblings becomes -- well -- sometimes quite astonishing.

For example, the sister who drove all the way to Indianapolis from Santa Fe to kidnap her mother in the middle of the night from the senior apartment complex where her mother was living very happily. She put everything in her SUV that fitted and the rest they left behind. Then she drove her mother to the southwest, installed her in her home and never told her sister where their mother was.

Consider the two sisters who removed their father from their brother's house, where he was being happily and properly looked after. They installed him in an assisted living facility he didn't want to be in and forbade their brother to visit his father there.

The East coast brother who wouldn't let his West coast sister care for their father at home, who then took that father and placed him in a care facility where he didn't visit him.

The two sisters who took their mother back to Kansas, leaving her second husband behind in Arizona. Two more sisters who refused to let their 98-year-old father live in the care of his good friends in the town he'd lived in for most of his life. Instead one of them took him to Texas, not to live with her, but to be put in a care facility there.

What is this all about? It's the special behavior of siblings behaving badly. Most often, it's the final playing out of old family struggles, siblings unable to forgive some perceived inequality of love. The examples I give here did not involve parental neglect or abuse.

Sometimes it's the final revenge for not getting equal attention in childhood. Sometimes it's grabbing final control over a parent who somehow affronted the adult children, often through remarrying after the death of the other parent.

As a longtime observer of caregiver families behaving badly, not much surprises me. In fact, the quite unusual scene of a family behaving very well is more of a surprise -- and really I'm not a cynic.

In my town, some years ago, an entire family of seven children came together from all over the United States to make a family plan for the care of their mother with dementia. They decided to help three of the siblings to purchase a property, create a care environment and give total support to the care of their mother for the next four years until her death. Now that is holy work.

It's also what family care of elders should ideally always be about. If siblings but realized it, caring for a parent is your last chance to heal the relationship and many of your childhood wounds. Of course, it takes courage. But the rewards are immense. You never lose the strength you grew in the process.