Hi. It is a big deal to me to have found this subreddit. It's amazing that there isn't more discussion and resources around this topic since it would seem like most people end up having aging parents.

I guess I have two main questions on my mind.

One is more simple. For those of you who are long distance from your parents/in laws, with semi-ok-ish relationships, what limits do you put around visits, especially holiday visits? I always struggle with visits feeling too long when they are about 10 days, but 7 days does seem pretty rushed especially with xmas shopping, and this year & last my preschooler son and I had viruses over the holidays. But very soon after xmas is over the fruitless emotional labor (already pretty high) skyrockets, and I am not the resilient, water-off-a-duck's-back type. They left just 1 day before my & my son's school starts. But the idea of insisting on shorter visits, I feel guilty about that.

The next question can quickly morph into a mega-everything question, so let me try to keep it focused. TLDR--are there resources to help guide semi-unwilling people to prepare for aging?

I struggle most with this issue about my mother. Three years ago she was given a longish term overdose of one of her medications for an autoimmune condition, and she "aged" severely in quite an abrupt way. Cognitive decline is a huge part of that. Not to the point of dementia, although it is infrequently borderline. My father is almost a decade older than her and in his 80s now, things are also concerning with his conditions, yet overall he's much better off than her. I have been trying to get them to deal with this for about two years now and they just won't. My father won't recognize it, and still depends on her a lot in many areas of life. They live a pretty complex lifestyle with few-to-no preparations for making concessions to aging. Of course dementia would be a lot worse than this cognitive decline, but it's like it's this category that nobody will take seriously or they immediately translate it into dementia. In fact when I talked to my mom she said she thinks she has dementia, but she can't look into seeing other health professionals or hiring an assistant of some kind because she has to get her cell phone looked at and hire somebody to drive them to their summer place (obviously a long way off as it's January). They're generally overwhelmed, don't want to change their lifestyle, and hiring any kind of assistant--which they can afford to do within limits but would of course be another complex thing to figure out--would be "admitting defeat." My father will barely acknowledge there's a problem (he's always been pretty dissociated) and refuses to help my mother deal, acts like that would be an insult to her. They push back on most of what I suggest, but then they want me to tell them exactly what to do in the few areas where they are somewhat willing, and I'm not prepared to be making exact decisions for them. I just feel like we're at a juncture where it's only going to get harder to "prepare" after this (in quotes because in some ways we're already there), and while I could help them if only they would be sensible, I am clueless about how to deal with them when all their stubbornness is added in, and there is no structure for support that I have found until it's at the point of semi-severe dementia.

So I dunno what that question is really. Isn't there some kind of support that can guide people before it's too late? Because we need it. All their good resources which they have now are devoted to propping up their lifestyle which is good in some ways, but without preparations at some point it's going to turn against them. While I don't feel like that point is urgently soon, I do feel like their capabilities for adapting are slipping away rapidly.