Just the other day, I was in a client's home for the first time and it comes to me that his situation is not all that unusual. There were plenty of informal care givers, children, friends etc but the house itself is in poor repair, cluttered and not clean. As we age our ability to keep things around us clean may be impaired due to medical or emotional issues. We need to step in to help when this begins to happen. Look around your relative's home and really take note of clutter that needs to be organized and trash that needs to be thrown away. Check the kitchen for proper food storage and get rid of spoiled food. Clean the counters, refrigerator and floor. Maybe clean the walls or paint them. Be sure that the bathrooms are clean and that the plumbing is in working order. This is all preparatory to brightening things up with a new coat of paint.
Another problem that pops up occurs when people move to small homes or apartments. The furniture that they own was made for larger rooms and now over fills the space. People will often hold onto things for memory's sake that are now only gathering dust. Sitting with your loved one to sort through the collected mound of stuff from a life time will take time but is worth the effort. You will be able to get them to toss or organize what they have elected to keep. You will also have the chance to reminisce about the good times.
And do this LONG BEFORE your aging loved one has to downsize possessions, in order to move from an apartment into a nursing home! All the more so if they can no longer reach unaided into a lot of the places where things are stored, like high shelves and low drawers.
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When my dad had to make that move, he couldn't get to everything, put heavy things out for the trash, or shlep loads of things to Goodwill (especially as he wasn't driving any more). I had to find a free weekend to visit, before the moving deadline, and do it all for him, helping him realize that he didn't need most of it. This resulted in about eight lawn-size bags of stuff being hauled off to the trash... including junk that SHOULD have been thrown out when he moved from the house to the retirement community! What I *would* have tried to donate to charity, had I had time and a proper vehicle to haul it, would have easily filled a dozen more lawn bags. (That's not including the furniture.) In the end he had to *pay* people to haul it all off, rather than getting a tax *writeoff* for donating it -- there was easily thousands of dollars worth of stuff there. I can only hope that, since it was mostly in boxes rather than bags, the haulers saw stuff they wanted and some of it found good homes. :-(
Dave, you are soooo right. My mother was in her home for 60+ years before she moved in with my brother. For about three years before she needed to move, my sister would come in from the Midwest to spend two weeks helping her go through the house one room at a time. There was still a great deal of stuff to go through when she moved and she wasn't particularly a pack rat. :-)
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