Caregiving Lessons: ‘Moving Mom In Wasn’t a Good Idea’

A sandwich-generation caregiver wonders if it was a mistake to have her mother live with her when she started showing signs of dementia

Jocelyn Jane Cox,

AARP

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Published January 20, 2026

Author Jocelyn Jane Cox (right) with mom, Barbara, who came to live with her during the early stages of dementia.

Courtesy Jocelyn Jane Cox

When my mother initially began to struggle with her memory, our instinct was to bring her closer to us. I lived with my husband, Rob, near Nyack, New York, where I’d moved to attend graduate school and where he worked in technology. My brother lived with his family about 25 minutes south, and our mother, Barbara, was living alone in Delaware, about three hours away from all of us. She’d been divorced from my father for more than 25 years.

Since our jobs didn’t allow remote work, we couldn’t relocate to where she was living. Inviting her to stay with us for a while was my husband’s idea. The suburban ranch house we’d purchased happened to have an attached apartment with a separate entrance. My mother was reluctant to join us but eventually agreed to move in with us January 2012. “Come on,” my husband urged her, saying, “After all, it’s called a mother-in-law suite for a reason.” We thought some laughter around shared meals would pull her out of the depression and mental fog that had set in while recovering from a broken hip. It seemed she was simply alone too much; maybe our company and TLC were all she needed.

Unfortunately, she did not improve while staying with us. Quite the opposite. I can only describe her cognitive and psychological decline from this point as precipitous. Within the first few months of moving in with us, she quickly lost the ability to use a key in a lock, write a check and use a microwave oven. She’d already been experiencing occasional memory lapses back in Delaware, but it seemed like the move to a different environment was fully disorienting. Having us nearby wasn’t as helpful to her as I had hoped.

Her frustration escalated. My formerly gentle and gracious mother, who’d shown so much kindness to me and many others, became increasingly resentful that she was no longer in her home. It was as if our house were a prison and we were her wardens. The shift in her personality and in our relationship broke my heart.

Jocelyn's mom and husband, Rob, who invited her to stay in their home's attached apartment in Nyack, New York.

Courtesy Jocelyn Jane Cox

As I suspected, my mother was diagnosed with dementia by a neurologist in April 2012. In addition to calming her fears, I spent most of my time off from work untangling health insurance and Medicare knots, taking her to doctor visits and to a series of appointments for occupational and neurological physical therapy. Around the same time as her diagnosis, I became pregnant with our son. I was suddenly wondering how I was going to care for her and a newborn at the same time.

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It’s, of course, impossible to know if her decline was destined to happen that swiftly wherever she was living or if this relocation expedited it. But I suspect it was the latter. It was as if whatever control she had over her brain had already been precarious and this transition tipped it over the edge.

She was waking up in the middle of the night, ringing our doorbell to frantically ask, “Where am I?” She exclaimed repeatedly, “I don’t know what I’m doing in New York!” After about nine months, we realized that caring for her ourselves was unsustainable. We weren’t going to be able to help her further, both because we’d soon be new parents and because, due to her physical and emotional volatility, she clearly now needed assistance from experienced professionals.

My mother was miserable with us but begged us not to send her to a nursing home, so we hired 24-hour care for her in her house, which, thankfully, we had not sold. She was delighted to return to her home and be “out of our hair” (her words), but she also didn’t understand why she needed someone to live with her, which created further waves of agitation. There was no way she could be alone at this point. We learned quickly that caregiving from afar was almost as challenging as having her under our roof.

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With a new baby and full-time jobs, we traveled down to Delaware as often as we could, but we couldn’t drop everything to attend to her frequent health crises in person. In addition to the paid caregiving service, we hired a geriatric care manager to help us manage local details and logistics. All of this was exorbitantly expensive, and funds were rapidly depleting, but at least she was where she wanted to be.

My mother was admitted to the hospital in Delaware with kidney trouble on our son’s first birthday, in December 2013. A few hours after party guests had left our house, she ended up going into cardiac arrest and passed away.

In the years since, I’ve wondered whether inviting her to live with us for those nine months disrupted her domestic life, making things worse for her. Maybe, cognitively, it would have been better for her to age in place.

More and more people are moving away from their hometowns to pursue educational or professional opportunities, then starting families hundreds or even thousands of miles away from family. The Pew Research Center reported in May 2022 that 40 percent of adults in the sandwich generation don’t live close to extended family. This puts millions of Americans in the difficult position of caring for loved ones from afar. It might make logical sense to bring our aging parents closer, but before uprooting them from their familiar settings, I recommend exhausting all other options first. Here are some things I wish we’d tried:

Ask your friends and your parent’s friends to stop by for social visits on a regular basis or even set up a rotating schedule.
Before the situation becomes dire, contact a geriatric care manager or geriatric social worker to proactively develop a care plan that makes sense for your whole family.
Hire a home health aide to assist with things like personal care, light housekeeping and medication reminders.
Enlist the help of transportation and meal services.
Explore local adult day programs that provide daily socializing and activities.

Of course, these possibilities require the cooperation of the recipient and may take some convincing. I suspect my mother would have resisted these ideas in the early days of her dementia. In the end, I can’t berate myself for any of the decisions we made. We did our best, and I encourage everyone going through this difficult situation to give themselves grace.

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As told to Paul Wynn

Jocelyn Jane Cox’s new book, Motion Dazzle: A Memoir of Motherhood, Loss, and Skating on Thin Ice (Vine Leaves Press), follows her journey through caregiving and new motherhood and her time as a nationally ranked U.S. figure skater.