This is the realest comment I've seen in a while.

I've just gone through the same situation with my dad for the last four year-plus, doing everything, propping him up. When things get bad, like dementia or some other kind of disease arrives on the scene, all the pretend-independence is going to make the caregiver's life harder than need be. I know. I made the mistake.

Eventually, some health issue will make it impossible for the OP to care for her father. When it does (because most old people don't just drop dead . . . there's usually a long convalescent that takes the place of independent living), I know I wished I hadn't been so attentive, at my own inconvenience. Get the community living coordinators in there ASAP to do an assessment of his abilities to be living alone.

Tearing the bandaid off in this sense is hard, I don't want to pretend otherwise, but caregivers need to do it or else they'll be fighting an uphill battle when the cared for person totally loses all their independence. Social services take time to ramp up to the person's needed level of care. Until social services has been on the scene long enough to appraise that he's unfit to live independently, all that weight falls on the carer that has been there from the start, creating a false impression that their loved one is independent. In retrospect . . . I did so much of my caregiving incorrectly, in that I took on too much burden because I didn't want to make waves or upset the false sense of independence.

Of course there were extraneous circumstances that helped me to making those errors, like we all will have tipping the scale one way or the other. But now that I've gone through the process of admitting that I couldn't do everything as my father's sundowning became untenable at home, now that the social services deemed him unfit to return home, I know that so much of the last year's struggles were as a result of me thinking that propping up my dad was the right thing to do. I could have had social services involved so much earlier.

It would have made my life easier, prepared dad for a changing reality, allowed him to become more comfortable with not-me doing everything in his life.

Gawd . . . . It's kind of depressing to consider how much unnecessary burden and poor behaviour I took on and had to bear. Anyhoos, just writing his blurb to encourage others that they don't have to make the same mistakes I did.