‘My father had dementia, he remarried, and his wife disappeared with him from my life’ – 12/28/2023 – Balance and Health

In 2012, Carolyn Stephens said goodbye to her 78-year-old widowed father as he left for Cyprus on vacation with a group of elderly people.

Vincent Stephens was comfortably retired after a successful career as an electrical engineer.

Upon his return, he introduced Carolyn to Iris, a 75-year-old woman he had befriended on vacation.

Carolyn, his only daughter, quickly became concerned about this new relationship.

In 2014, Vincent sold his home, in a village in Suffolk County, England, where he had lived since retirement, and bought a new house 30 miles away, in Norfolk, to be close to Iris.

Carolyn suspected that Iris was trying to separate him from his family, as well as the network of friendships he had built over his years in Suffolk.

“It was actually very distressing for my father,” she says.

“I remember a conversation where she was shouting at him saying that my father didn’t love me. And he said ‘yes, of course I do, she’s my daughter — of course I love her’.”

Vincent told his daughter that he couldn’t understand why she and Iris didn’t get along.

Vincent’s brother-in-law, Brian, says that Vincent seemed happy with Iris when they first started getting together, but that he became worried when he saw how Carolyn was being pushed out of her father’s life.

“He loved his daughter so much, so how he felt when they lost touch, I don’t know, but I saw how worried Carolyn was about that,” says Brian.

Vincent’s sister-in-law Sheila also had doubts about Iris.

“She wasn’t very friendly, and I don’t know if she thought [a família de Vincent] competed with her for his attention,” he says.

“But she seemed very jealous of Carolyn’s relationship with her father.”

Carolyn was also concerned about her father’s deteriorating mental state and the fact that he was showing early signs of dementia.

“Dad became more fragile. He was forgetting to take out car insurance, missing appointments.”

Vincent’s Worrying Mental Decline

In 2018, Carolyn accompanied Vincent to an appointment with the family doctor, who assessed possible cognitive decline.

The test was inconclusive, but there was cause for concern, and the doctor recommended further investigation.

But Vincent did not show up for a second appointment, and subsequent follow-ups were cancelled.

James Warner, a doctor specializing in the field, says this is a common problem.

“Most people with dementia don’t know they have dementia,” he says.

“So they don’t go to the doctor and say something is wrong.”

Meanwhile, a rapid sequence of events caused Carolyn increasing fear.

Vincent moved in with Iris and, a few weeks later, she took him to a registry office to get married.

However, the ceremony did not take place because the clerk was very concerned about Vincent’s mental health.

“He couldn’t answer even basic questions about his own address, his fiancée’s date of birth, where or when he was supposed to get married,” says Carolyn.

Still, that same week, Carolyn learned that Iris had obtained power of attorney to represent Vincent.

She now had the legal right to act on his behalf in both financial and property matters and health and welfare matters.

Anyone granting a power of attorney must have sufficient mental capacity to understand the consequences of what they are doing and must not be coerced into signing. But the system is open to abuse, says Warner.

“I had a case where I was asked to assess someone’s ability to sign a durable power of attorney for property and finances,” says the doctor.

“My conclusion was that the person didn’t have mental capacity. And the family said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get someone else to authorize it.'”

Within days, Vincent’s house was put up for sale. But the worst was yet to come — something Carolyn had never predicted.

Iris complained to the police that Carolyn was harassing Vincent and that he no longer wanted anything to do with his daughter.

“The police [me disse] that I couldn’t contact my father again because I was abusing him,” says Carolyn.

“I called back and said, can you tell me exactly what I allegedly did? And they couldn’t.”

Carolyn was worried about her father’s well-being, but the call from the police — and the threat of further action against her — made her afraid to call him.

In early 2019, she received an email from her father informing her that he had been hospitalized after a fall.

Neither Carolyn nor any family members were informed about the accident.

During a visit to Vincent in the hospital, she witnessed Iris telling him that he had to choose between his family or her.

‘I didn’t know if he was alive for years’

Shortly after, Carolyn was informed that — despite being diagnosed with dementia while in the hospital — her father had signed a document preventing any information from being shared with his daughter.

A few months later, she was informed that his house had been sold and his possessions had been removed.

Over the next few years, Carolyn’s family and friends tried to call Iris’s home to speak to Vincent.

They always heard that he had gone out, was sleeping or didn’t want to talk — and then the phone was usually hung up on them.

“We sent birthday cards and Christmas cards, hoping they would reach him,” says Carolyn.

“We learned later that none of these cards ever reached him. He had no idea that people were still trying to contact him.”

Carolyn didn’t see or hear from her father for almost four years. For a while, she didn’t know if he was alive.

In May 2022, Carolyn discovered that Iris had died. Family members tried to contact her family to find out where Vincent was, without success.

When the clerk confirmed Iris’ death to Carolyn, she saw that her father was no longer listed as living at her address. But where was he?

Sheila called Iris’s house again, and a man said he “couldn’t help her.”

The family alerted the UK’s National Missing Persons Unit, and Carolyn began her own search for Vincent.

Every three months, she checked the new update to the national death registry in hopes of not seeing her father’s name there. “It was harrowing,” she says.

“But I had to keep looking. I needed to know if my father had died, at least that would be closure to this story.”

Carolyn also started looking at voter registration.

She was unable to find her father’s details anywhere on the internet, so she turned to the more detailed complete record, kept on paper at the British Library in London.

Carolyn and her husband began combing through the names and addresses of everyone in Norfolk – where Vincent had lived in his last known domicile.

With 700,000 registered voters there in 2022, it was not an easy task.

The reunion of father and daughter

For nearly a week, they checked every page of the records, and then Carolyn finally saw her father’s name associated with “a little nursing home in the middle of nowhere.”

Carolyn says it was one of the happiest moments of her life: “The librarians had to tell me to be quiet… because I was running around screaming, ‘I found him, I found him!'”

She discovered that Vincent had been placed in a nursing home as soon as restrictions on movement due to the Covid pandemic began.

He was later transferred to another nursing home.

When Carolyn arrived, she saw almost no personal items in his room, and staff said he had few visitors.

“There was only a single painting left from his house, there wasn’t a single photo of the family,” she says.

“The care home staff had no idea of ​​his love of opera, no idea he had a daughter and a huge network of people who loved him and were very worried about him.”

When her father saw her, he waved his arms in the air and shouted, “Surprised!” —was all he could say.

His dementia was so advanced that he was unable to communicate any other way. But it was enough for Carolyn, who ran to his bed and hugged him.

“I’ll never forget that. I was really nervous because I thought he might not recognize me after all that time,” she says.

“But he couldn’t stop smiling, he had a huge smile, you know. It was just lovely. It was unbelievable, really.”

Carolyn continues to try to understand what happened all those years ago.

In 2012, Vincent had savings of 50 thousand pounds (R$308 thousand) and a house worth 250 thousand pounds (R$1.5 million).

When he was found in 2022, he had no home, few possessions and 83 thousand pounds (R$512 thousand) in the bank.

The BBC reached out to Iris’ family for comment on the case, but received no response.

Experiencing what happened to her father led Carolyn to believe that stronger legal protections are needed for vulnerable seniors.

Carolyn says that if her father had been able to anticipate and plan for what might happen to him, or if he had been diagnosed early and perhaps made a power of attorney in advance for him to protect him, it would have been more difficult to take him away from her. and family.

She is also concerned that a new Power of Attorney Act, which aims to speed up the process in England and Wales, could make older British people more vulnerable.

Vincent died in June this year, six months after reuniting with his daughter.

“We were able to do a very simple memorial in the same spot where Mom is buried,” says Carolyn.

“It almost felt like these last five years hadn’t happened.”

She says people ask her how she moved forward throughout this period. She says it was because Vincent was her father.

“I wasn’t going to let him die thinking that I had stopped wanting to see him and caring about him,” she says.

“He took care of me my whole life, and I never wanted him to think I abandoned him.”

This text was originally published here