Thank you for your thoughts. We had a good call with our daughter tonight and I needed to prompt my husband with things to say. At least he felt like he was taking a part in the conversation. Our children really don’t understand the day to day challenges we face. I look at each day as another challenge and try not to let it get to me. Just writing about it, seems to help. Again, thank you for your response. It’s nice to know I’m not alone.

PLEASE, Please, please communicate honestly with your children! The first we learned of my father-in-law's rapid decline between Easter and 4th of July when we visited we were shocked by the personality changes and the strain in the household. His Mom, uncle, cousins, neighbors...didn't want to stress us out or worry us, in spite of weekly calls amongst many of us.

Three weeks later, my mother-in-law showed up unannounced at our door, over 200 miles away, for an extended visit, leaving Dad's brother to care for him, because she was overwhelmed - mostly be personality changes. Needless to say we jumped into action, but we would have preferred to help make choices before a crisis.

30 years later, the same thing happened to my daughter and her husband. Even though my daughter had worked in memory care for 10 years, and she had been trying to push the family into action for 2 years. Mom wandered away from home, sans cell phone and jacket, in 0F temperatures - it took the family and local PD 5 hours to find her (safe.) The care choices at that point were limited, and led to a far-too-early fatal outcome for my son's Mom (and my friend.)

I don’t think as parents we ever stop wanting to protect our children, regardless of their age, of the harsh realities of the not so pretty parts of our daily lives when we live with dementia. Even though they are adamant about wanting to be there for us, and help anyway they can, we still find it hard to share the realities of our days. Our daughter left yesterday to enjoy a nice vacation trip… there is no way I would tell when I talked with her that her dad left home yesterday, drove into town, saw a couple of policeman parked on the side of the road, and stopped to ask for help because people have a hit out on him. He experiences delusions. This was a first for him, but it may have also been a blessing in disguise because I have been trying to stop his driving completely and now thanks to his actions yesterday I may be able to. He even ask me this morning about selling his truck. I have not shared this with any of our three children. They live busy lives and have teenagers to keep up with, there is nothing they can do. As long as I can handle my husband’s day to day on my own I will.