“Should I Place My Husband in a Nursing Home Before He Needs It?”
I am livid because he convinced me to believe him. If I had known sex was involved, I would have left him. I just don’t forgive easily. What do I do now? This feels fresh to me although it happened years ago but my husband has early stage Alzheimer’s and needs care.
I am bitter beyond words. I just feel a complete loss of love for him. I might add that in later years, he continued to contact old girlfriends and meet in hotels. I caught him once before it happened but I now think I didn’t always catch him.
Should I separate from him, place him in a nursing home before he actually needs it, or swallow my sense of self-esteem and tell myself it’s too late to be angry? — Livid After All These Years
You know what I think? I think you cannot possibly be shocked to learn that your husband cheated on you all those years ago with his ex-girlfriend in that hotel room, and quite possibly cheated – or tried to cheat -with multiple other women throughout the years. Believing your husband 25 years ago when he said he only met with his ex-girlfriend in a hotel room to “talk” because “she was going through some tough times” is a choice. You chose to overlook the obvious to maintain your marriage and avoid conflict.
But conflict can be hard to avoid when there’s an issue that needs to be addressed. Eventually, the conflict arrives no matter how much we try to repress it. Here, now, that conflict you didn’t deal with all those years ago has presented itself in the conflicted feelings you have regarding your husband’s care. For twenty-five years you were able to repress whatever concerns or doubt you had about your husband’s fidelity and take advantage of whatever benefits staying quiet and not rocking the boat of your marriage offered you. What has changed now is not your sudden understanding of your husband’s infidelity. Surely, you’ve suspected it all along. What has changed is the cost-benefit ratio you experience in your marriage.
You probably have some idea how much care is involved for an Alzheimer’s patient. It can be grueling – physically and emotionally – for close family members, and it comes with a loss of support from the person with the disease, creating a double whammy for the people once dependent on him or her. I can see why you’d resent being in this position for someone who betrayed you and whose betrayal you never fully processed. I can understand why it would feel easier to process that anger now than deal with the demands of caregiving. It’s OK, too, to be honest with yourself that you simply don’t have it in you to do it. In fact, being honest with yourself about a lot of what you’re feeling right now is the very best thing you can do in terms of deciding the best path forward.
I do not recommend swallowing your pride or telling yourself it’s too late to be angry. Further repression of feelings is not the answer here. Being honest about what you can and can’t take on and what you are willing to do for your husband to ensure his basic needs for care are met is the answer. I think separating from him and washing your hands of any responsibility of him just when he will really needs support is a bad look and probably won’t make you feel great in the long run. YOU don’t have the be the one to take on his care, but placing him in the good care of someone else can be a compromise that will relieve you of the heaviest burden while not betraying your role to him.
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Knowing what is involved taking care of someone with this affliction is confronting having done it as a daughter and niece. Known what you’ve learnt obviously will play into that. I personally agree that assisting him into care is a great compromise – and once he’s safe he can get his various girlfriends to entertain him
Caring for someone with Alzheimers is so, so difficult. I think you should find a place to care for him, because if you try to take on that role yourself, your repressed anger is likely to emerge in the kind of care he receives from you.
To LW:
As someone whose parents both had dementia before their recent deaths, I know part of what you’re experiencing.
I would strongly encourage you to do a few things:
1) Get counseling. This is an overwhelming situation in so many ways, and a professional can help you to process your emotions so that you can make decisions that you will be content with years from now.
2) Take some time to make decisions that will impact the rest of your life rather than reacting out of anger. Unless your husband has an unusually fast progressing dementia, taking a few months won’t greatly change your situation.
3) Seek expert help on financial/estate/divorce planning. Medicare, Medicaid, and financial planning are all complex and having knowledgeable help will be invaluable.
4) Explore non-nursing options for care. There are booth single house and large facility assisted living which can provide excellent care for dementia patients who do not need nursing level physical care. In most of them, you would be able to live with your husband without a substantially higher cost if that is the route that you choose.
Perhaps an obvious question but–what does your husband have to say about this? People in “early stages” of dementia usually still have long stretches of time where they have full or close to full facilities, still know their loved ones, still remember large parts of their past, and still maintain capacity to both take accountability for their actions and direct parts of their own care. If you have not spoken to your husband about this, you need to do that soon, on one of his good days. I would have a lot more willingness to care for an unfaithful but fading husband who admitted he lied to maintain the marriage, took accountability for his poor behaviour, talked about what steps he took after that to recommit to the marriage, apologised genuinely, and accepted your anger than someone who continued to lie to my face and mislead me and insist I wasn’t allowed to be mad about it. I think most people I have known in “early stages” of dementia where the disease was acknowledged and planned for were also involved in that planning. If you cannot remain in your marriage and in one-on-one caregiving after finding out (admitting your yourself?) about his infidelity, he has a right to know that and to be able to make his own decisions about what that means for his future, while he still can.
Also–I know a fair amount of aging couples that are divorced but one continues to provide or oversee care for the other. That is an option available to you to honor yourself but also your family and your values, depending on what they are.