A tragic end to 70 years of marriage

[n2doc]

Through seven decades of marriage, Roy Charles Laird was by his wife's side.

After Clara got sick and started showing signs of dementia, he refused to hire nursing aides to help care for her. He insisted on doing everything himself — from washing her laundry to cooking her meals.

He was there nearly every day, a pained witness to her steady decline over the last five years.

He was also there at the end, according to Seal Beach police, who say that on Sunday around noon, 88-year-old Roy killed 86-year-old Clara with a single gunshot to the head at her nursing home.

He was arrested on suspicion of murder for what some who know them see as an act of love.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-mercy-kill-20101122,0,1208279.story

[LibDemAlways]

1. This is very sad. Coping with a loved one with dementia is

incredibly hard and takes a terrible toll on the caregiver - especially an elderly man who is trying to do it alone. Having to put her in a nursing home was probably the last straw for him and put him over the edge. Just a tragedy.

[Initech]

13. My grandma had that - it got pretty horrific toward the end.

I can only imagine what this guy went through - it's crazy to think that this runs in my family.

[Brickbat]

2. Our culture is so broken when it comes to elder care and death itself. As the population ages, we

will see more of this. So sad.

[NV Whino]

3. Similar thing happened in my neck of the woods

Just substitute pillow for gunshot. Arrested, pleaded guilty, convicted, released on his own recognizance, died shortly thereafter.

[progressoid]

4. I understand that they have to arrest him but,

I hope he is soon released as well.

Clearly this was not a crime.

[Erose999]

5. My great grandma's roommate at the nursing home had dementia really bad

she would constantly call out for "Wilbur" (her husband?) and that she had supper ready, etc. You could ask her what she had prepared for supper and she would tell you... cornbread, fried taters, and turnip greens. She'd say "we'll eat when Wilbur gets here". So sad.

And my great grandma, she had Alzheimer's really bad. She was a big Elvis fan so for her 96th birthday we brought her a 8x10 of the King to keep in her room. She looked at the picture, looked at me, and then she said: "Is that one of your school pictures, son?"

[DeschutesRiver]

6. Oregon has a Death with Dignity Act, but that doesn't appear to apply to this circumstance

because just from a skim of it, it requires the person themselves to be capable of making and communicating health care decisions for him/herself, mainly because this isn't a euthanasia act requiring a doctor to do the act; rather the patient must be the one to commit the final act themselves. I had never thought about this angle before, but if you have dementia then this act doesn't seem to allow you this option in Oregon.

http://www.oregon.gov/DHS/ph/pas/faqs.shtml

This story is just so sad to me. I wonder if they'd discussed such things long before her dementia. I have parents in their 80s, and know enough about them and from what they've said in the past that this is exactly what they would do, if dementia took away their terminal illness options under Oregon's act.

The only thing I've learned in life so far is that I don't judge people at these kind of junctures in their life, unless I know everything they are up against, and even then, if it is their choice, then it isn't my life to live or not live.

[kickysnana]

7. Luckily my Dad had made a living will...

He was 85 and doing OK until Christmas last year when his body started its shutdown. The physical part was fixed over the months but he had a timebomb. His brain was atrophying but he was brilliant, had patents, memory like an elephant, to start with and lived as a high functioning person with and Aspergers like syndrome that made him work hard to be social and he was. Because he was so in tune with his behavior he compensated until he started intermittently sundowning in April following pneumonia. He began to have delusions and the last week of May he took off with a car full of "nobody there's" to find a family member stranded he thought had called him. My brother was called by the police and Dad collapsed one week later. I stayed with him for three weeks, keeping him safe. He did not sleep but spent hours sleep walking, dressing and undressing, pantomiming cleaning and cooking, except for 10-15 minute cat naps despite strong nighttime sedatives. He was tested for anything and everything that might be causing it but it was his brain.

My siblings overruled me staying with him at his home and two of them took him to the hospital After medication changes, , and attempts to get him to sleep normally and a procedure to stabilize his heartbeat to allow blood flow to the brain did not bring and improvement we honored his wishes. The diagnosis of end stage dementia was solidified. He had become incontinent in that last week and was having great difficultly swallowing. He was transferred to an assisted care facility/hospice but one of us was there 24 hours. Eventually that week he started refusing liquids. He was lucid for a few minutes a day and I was there when he realized he was dying, he swore, which he never did with ladies present. He slipped into a coma right after supper, which he refused tacitly, and passed away at 3am July 1st.

A nurse who came in told us we were lucky he had done a living will and we were honoring it. Her mother in law was spared no expense to keep her alive with fluids and artificial nutrition and zombiing drugs and she lived like Dad was his last week for 18 months instead of one week.

I was so invested in restoring Dads health that I was furious with my siblings at the time for taking him to the hospital the last time but they were as worried about my health as Dads because I was getting no sleep and I realized that almost immediately after Dad died. When asked how I managed for three weeks my immediate thought was channeling dead Dutch/Belgian ancestors who fought the sea every day of their lives.

It is so sad that this man had no help and bore this burden alone until he could no longer.

" I know pain. You think you can handle it and one day you can't."-- Dr House

[The Doctor.]

22. Thanks for posting this.

Some people are forced to suffer too long. I hope I'm as lucky as your dad and my kids turn out to be like his.

[DeschutesRiver]

25. I was a caregiver in an entirely different context, but because of that

I have an idea of what you went through, and I admire that you found your courage and the strength to be the kind of caregiver you were for your dad in his last months. Yes, the clarity needed to see a situation accurately and objectively can become lost when sleep deprivation is longstanding, btdt. But what else can a person do, other than keep digging deep while there is still some hope that your loved one may pull through or at least have as much comfort as possible during what may turn out to be the end stage of life? When things unfold and unravel for someone as they did for your dad, and a loved one is determined to do whatever is possible in the face of not knowing for certain what is wrong or what can be achieved, there can be a fierce urgency to caregiving that is hard to describe to anyone who hasn't experienced it.

The worst for me is the point where caregiving with an eye toward eventual recovery of some sort finally gives way when the end has become inevitable - when hope for a better tomorrow becomes the knowledge that there is nothing left to do and a plea that there be no more extreme suffering if there is no way to alleviate it. I am glad that your dad wasn't alone in his time of need, and it does break my heart knowing what the man in the OP was going through all by himself, after so many years of partnership with his spouse. It must have felt almost unbearable, the heartbreak and the exhaustion teaming up to erase anything other than the daily struggle to find a way to truly help what no longer had a viable solution.

Your last line, the quote, sums it up. Until a person has walked down that path, they just can't know how true that line is. I hope you are doing better now with the passage of some time, and with hindsight, will judge what you did for him not by the outcome, but by the efforts you made while there was still some hope that things might work out well somehow. It would have been far worse if there had been no one on your dad's team to support him as you and your family did during his battle against the odds. Take care.

DR

P.S. Because of the lessons of what I've recently experienced, and on the heels of reading what you posted, I am finally going to draft a living will/directive for me and dh. Postponing doing so has been a dumb move, and the risk that something could happen before we have such a thing in place is just nothing to mess with. Thanks for sharing your experiences.

[Liberal_in_LA]

8. In these cases, the male partner kills the female partner overwhelmingly

The woman gets a bullet to the head. The male dementia patient goes on living. I'm just saying...

[yurbud]

9. yeah, I thought of a headline on this the other day: study showed when women get sick, men split

In a case like this, it's possible to hide your motives from yourself with a mercy killing instead of simply removing yourself.

[Liberal_in_LA]

10. yep

[Bonobo]

16. Huh? You mean women lack the courage to do the right thing?

What's your point?

Are you saying that living with dementia in a nursing home and shitting and pissing yourself until you die with bed-sores is the 'better way'?

[Withywindle]

19. It's only the right thing if there was an agreement established beforehand.

All the above posters are commenting on is the general tendency of women to be much better caretakers over the long term, even when there isn't much hope for recovery.

Which is in no way INNATE: it's just that girls are conditioned to be caretakers from birth and boys aren't. Boys are taught to change the world in their favor; girls are taught to be patient. Any wonder that women are better at patience?


Honestly, I would rather get a bullet to the head than decades of deterioration in a nursing home. I'd rather my spouse not take it upon her/himself to do it without a prior agreement, though.

[Bonobo]

20. I agree with everything you said.

Although I tend to suspect that 'caretaking' is something that has a genetic component as well.

[Withywindle]

21. Maybe genetic, maybe not.

I know there are plenty of males who are good at long-term caretaking and many females who aren't. (I'm in the latter group, honestly.)

I think that both boys and girls should be taught that there is a time to be assertive and a time to be patient. And that sooner or later, if we live long enough, all our bodies will start to fail us, and real love means sticking around to the bitter end, if you possibly can.

[FourScore]

11. That is so sad.

:cry:

[Freetradesucks]

12. I bet the plan was,

to put a bullet in his own head after, but he changed his mind.

Figured he go on just a bit longer.........

[Stinky The Clown]

14. The Hemlock Society

http://www.compassionandchoices.org/hemlock

[liberalhistorian]

15. My still-fairly-young stepdad is in a nursing

home with dementia; mom kept him at home as long as she could before having to institutionalize him. He no longer recognizes anyone or knows anything. But she would never consider doing anything like that, or even be capable of it, and I don't understand how he could have taken a gun to his own wife, how that would in any way have made him think his pain would have been eased at all.

[Angry Dragon]

18. I do not thinkit is done to ease the pain of the one left behind

It is to ease the suffering of the one suffering the disease

[madinmaryland]

17. My Dad just went through that with my mother...

He took care of her day and night, even moving into a retirement home.

Never once did he contemplate ending her life, needlessly. When she finally contracted pneumonia, we as a family knew that it was time for hospice care.

Dementia is a horrible disease. She was such a wonderful person.

:cry:

[Obamanaut]

23. Positive thoughts from our family to yours. It isn't much, but it's all we can offer. nt

[Vinca]

24. The prospects for the end of life are starting to terrify me.

They should give us gift certificates to Dr. Kevorkian . . . just in case.

[yurbud]

26. take up a high risk sport and continue to do it until old age

when your reflexes and mental acuity start to slip, you'll make a mistake that will kill you.

Rock climbing, skydiving, hang gliding--there's a lot of ways to do it.