The unspoken difficulties when a family member passes away

Exactly a year ago, I cleaned up my house, put everything into storage, listed my home for sale, and moved to Oklahoma to care for my mother during what we believed would be the last year of her life. She was on hospice and wasn’t expected to live much longer.

Before I arrived, we had already dealt with neighbors stealing her retirement money, her car, family heirlooms, and draining her bank accounts. What I wasn’t prepared for was the condition she was living in. My children had arranged in-home care for her and assured me she was being taken care of, that everything was fine.

It wasn’t fine.

The house was filled with urine, dirty adult diapers, feces, mice, cockroaches, garbage, and overwhelming filth. My mother had wasted away to skin and bones. On top of that, dementia had changed her completely. She became cruel in ways I still struggle to process, and some of the things she said to me continue to haunt me.

I had imagined arriving to find her bedridden and mostly unaware. Instead, I found a woman who, nine times out of ten, would run naked through the house, defecating as she went, screaming obscenities at all hours of the day and night—sometimes from the front porch for the entire neighborhood to hear.

I had no choice but to place her in a nursing home, hoping it would only be temporary until my house sold and I could buy something nearby. But my house never sold, and my mother’s house was eventually condemned. It was literally collapsing off its foundation. The home was over a hundred years old, and years of neglected maintenance had finally caught up with it. I couldn’t stay in Oklahoma any longer and eventually had to return to Utah.

Once I started untangling her finances, I realized things were even worse than I’d thought. At some point, my mother had removed me from her bank accounts, so I had no authority to manage her finances. Because of the theft by her neighbors, DHS had assigned a government-appointed accountant to control her money and pay her bills.

Anything I spent trying to help her—a replacement washing machine when hers broke, dumpsters to clean out the house, food, cleaning supplies—came entirely out of my own pocket and was considered non-reimbursable. My mother was incontinent and constantly soiling everything, yet when the washing machine died, the government representative refused to replace it. She was expected to live in that filth.

Then, in February, my mother passed away.

I traveled back to Oklahoma alone to arrange her cremation, bury her, and obtain her death certificate. The nursing home refused to return her belongings to me, though they did offer a small amount of the money they held from her account toward the cremation costs. I found out yesterday they never paid their part of the costs and now I am held accountable for it.

It was the most devastating experience of my life: standing alone in the middle of rural Oklahoma, burying my mother in what was essentially a post-hole grave because it was all I could afford.

This past week, I discovered the government-appointed accountant had actually set aside money for my mother’s burial. But because I had already paid the expenses myself, I still won’t be reimbursed. Worse, the remaining money—taken from my mother’s Social Security payments—doesn’t automatically go to her heirs. If I don’t pay for probate and establish an estate account through the courts, the funds revert to the government. And even if I did open an estate account, I’m being told I would still need to provide receipts for reimbursement from my own mother’s money.

Meanwhile, bills are still arriving because the nursing home and government accountant—the only people with access to her finances—failed to pay many of them while she was alive. I also discovered my mother’s taxes hadn’t been filed or paid for the last five years. Now the government accountant expects me to handle that too. Since there’s almost no money left in the estate besides the burial funds, paying those taxes would likely come out of my own pocket as well.

After spending the last year trying to care for my mother, I am now facing the possibility of losing my own home and becoming homeless because of the debt I’ve accumulated. I once read that many homeless people are those who went broke caring for aging parents. I understand that now in a way I never could before.

At this point, I honestly don’t know how to rebuild my life after everything that has happened. What I do know is that I never want my own children to carry this kind of burden for me someday. But I’m not wealthy, I don’t have the answers, and for the first time in my life, I am truly scared.