A feeling of helplessness

[lumpygravy]

I didn't know if this should be a "Hate" topic because it is part rant, but if it's OK with the Mods, I'd like to see if others might share their perspectives if they have experienced the same or similar circumstances. Here goes:

At the request of my mom, I've been in the downtown Sudbury Canada area for the past 4 days "visiting" my 92 year old aunt (on my late dad's side) essentially on a mission of mercy. The purpose of this trip was to return a piece of family jewelry and to attempt to perform some general maintenance on the aunts 14 unit apartment building. To say that this apartment building suffers from deferred maintenance would be a gross understatement.

My aunt has admittedly had a hard road in life, with an overbearing MIL (perhaps mentally abusive), a language barrier (she's Chinese and speaks very little English) and an obsessive compulsion to collect and hoard. She is now physically unable to perform any maintenance on the building and she refuses to hire people to do the required maintenance and improvement work. She allows tenants to go late on their rent in the hopes of bartering for services which are then never performed. She apparently has tons of money, but cannot see the fallacy of her thrift.

She has two daughters with what I believe to be mental issues though they seem to have adapted to society more successfully.

The younger one is a successful musician and music teacher, married, two kids and living the good Sudbury life. However she a compulsive need to occupy every waking moment with an activity of some form i.e. cleaning/vacuuming the house at 1am in the morning.

The other is socially mal-adjusted, appears to have a mild learning disability and unfortunately shares the mom's collecting and hoarding obsession. She sleeps in one of the apartment units and does everything else in the mom's unit i.e. eat, bathroom, etc....

My aunt's apartment is a death trap - literally. There is so much crap piled on top of other crap and doorways and hallways are blocked. If there is a serious fire in her kitchen while she's in the unit, she will die.

In the short time that I've been here, I've done my best to document everything that I see and to pass that on to the two daughters. My only real hope is that they take my warning about the fire safety hazard seriously enough to actually do something about it for their mom. However, the daughters are so messed up in the head that I don't see it happening. I think the younger one has a shot especially since her hubs is quite a normal and responsible guy.

There's so much more, but thankfully, I get to leave now for the drive back to Toronto and decompress with another set of relatives who are normal. These last four days have given me a new found respect for those people who have the desire, patience and will to work with the mentally impaired. Those who do this kind of work are much bigger people than me.

[Youngeyes]

You did all you could. If you want to help further, you should contact social services and ask that a counseler be sent to investigate health and safety issues for your aunt. Not sure how socialized medicine works in Canada. It's now up to her daughters to take over. You're a good person for the effort and are to be commended.

[hiker88]

There's a limit to the help you can give to those who are not willing to help themselves. I commend you for your efforts.

[lumpygravy]

So I'm finally back in the good ole US of A.

Thanks for the repsonses. They really do help to confirm my feeling that there is little that I can do.

As for a call to social services or some form of government assistance/intervention, I really don't know how that works in Canada. My aunt (and cousins) is just mentally capable enough that it would be difficult to prove that she's a danger to herself. Except for the fire hazard in her apartment unit, the rest of the building has no glaring safety hazards. There are some things that I would change/upgrade, but I don't know what's required in Canada. Additionally, the more I thought about it, the more I came to the conclusion that it is not my place to make changes and clean her place out of her possessions.

Talking with my mom on the way home, we've agreed that we tried and that we have accept that the attempt is all that we can do.