posted 4 years ago
I have been in a less extreme version of this very situation. Ten years of eldercare pretty much demolishes the productive center of your life if you don't have enough control to live your best life on the property where you do it. It can vary between spouses, too: perhaps one bears more of the burden of care, leaving the other one more free to make money or whatever, subject to the limitations of geography. After a decade of this, the impacts can be very disparate: life-destroying for one, merely burdensome for the other.
One thing I do know: hoarders never relax control. They won't do it, they don't want to do it, and they mostly can't do it.
We still have one hoarded-to-the-rafters room years after taking possession. [edited to add: Plus two collapsed outbuildings full of stuff that were rubble piles when we got here, and need to be cleaned up with a front-end loader.] Time, energy, money, trash disposal, capacity to endure exposure to allergens -- the costs of cleanup are at best dismaying, and at worst, prohibitive.
This is all intensely personal and gets to core values: personal autonomy, obligation to family, willingness to initiate or endure confrontation, love, frustration, and so much more. Nobody can advise how to navigate all those shoals because nobody else can see them all or put accurate weights on the different ones in order to balance them up.
In the end, it usually boils down to how much you're needed by your elders and whether their perception of that matches your own. If they need you and they know it utterly, you have leverage to negotiate. "This isn't working for us, and it's never going to work for us. Unless you give us complete control to sort, sell, burn, or dispose of all the stuff in our dwelling and on such-and-so patch of land we need for our garden and pastures, we are out of here because we can't live here no matter how much you love us." The trouble is, most hoarders are so unable to practice that level of detachment from their treasures, they will say "Fine, I never needed you anyway, bye" and then what do you do? Worse yet, if they are emotionally manipulative people, they'll know full well that their own need will keep you from leaving. More often, their denial (about needing you) will prevent them from feeling any urgency about your statement of what you need in the situation.
In the end, the resource limits for cleaning up a property are, IMO, a non-issue if it's to be your home. In the long run, you will chip away at it until it's done. But that's only true if you're allowed to chip away. If you can't start, you'll never finish.
In our situation, we just sucked it up and took the damage to our personal lives. We ended up in possession of the property (more or less, like all things in life there are complicating details) and enough constraints on our options from the ten years we spent on eldercare that we're unlikely to ever go anywhere else. In the end, it is a life, and I have lots of space to plant trees.
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