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My aging BPD mother is facing some challenging health issues.  I have effectively disengaged over the past 3 years with help of a counselor.  Now, with a medical crisis on the horizon,  she has called me and my sister in crisis mode.  I feel I will be morally obligated to help in some way as the situation progresses.  I would like to hear how others have decided what to do/not to do in a similar situation.  The last time she had surgery, she suffered from severe hallucinations and was physically violent with me while hospitalized.  The doctors and nurses blamed it all on anesthesia, meds, and aging.  Thank you!

Hi, fernRunner!

While I can't tell you what is right for you to do, I can tell you what my husband and I each are doing with our own aging uBPDmoms.

My mom (waif/hermit/past witch) is only in her late 50s but has recently experienced a drastic decrease in health due to chronic diabetes and complications from her recurrence of breast cancer (which she had previously beaten a decade ago.) She lives alone in a disgusting, falling-apart house (disintegrating due to her depression and general inability to take care of things.) I have not "supported" her in any very involved sense, other than praying for her and re-posting her prayer requests to mutual friends and family. She lives 800 miles away from me and has a church community that makes sure her needs are met. I make sure to call her once a month or so (she rarely calls me, preferring to passive-aggressively post on Facebook to court attention from me and my husband.) Because of the complications from the cancer (which is now in remission again), she will likely never return to work again and may have to be on an oxygen tank for the rest of her life. My father, who is still legally married to her but lives elsewhere, does nothing for her, and her brother is really the only healthy and influential person in her life. He wants me to be more involved in driving my mom to make sensible decisions for her future, but I won't do it. It is not worth it to me, not even to alleviate the guilt I still struggle against. I have a difficult enough time maintaining the mostly-peaceful Low Contact we have; I cannot and will not be a support for her as she ages and deteriorates. Yes, that leaves it to other people to do, but it does not cost them what it would cost me. I pay it forward by helping out with other difficult people I know who do not cost me emotionally, to relieve the burden on THEIR struggling relatives.

My husband's uBPDmom is a worse case (queen/witch/hermit, in mental hospital at least twice, had to get cops involved a couple of years ago.) We have gone completely No Contact with her for over 18 months now and do not intend to ever attempt reconciliation. She is in her early 70s, and recently we were contacted by her husband (my own husband's father is deceased) who left messages telling us she was in very serious condition in the hospital. She came close to dying, but we never contacted them or acknowledged the phone message. Her complete inability to be anything but toxic to us is so proven that my husband has already in a sense said his goodbyes to the idea of a mother, and while he would have been relieved if she were removed from ever being able to harass us again, he's still praying for her own twisted soul to heal as long as she is still living.

And so we work on finding our peace, but take no responsibility for our mothers finding theirs. Years of trying to help them do so never worked anyway.