Mother doesn’t want me to make her home safer for her.

Oh yes! Living this now.

"What a good idea *you* had there.." 🙄

This!!!

I have to agree with you. Let them decide, consequences are theirs. My strong-willed 81 yr old narcissistic, controlling mother will not take any of my advice, because she still thinks I'm a teenager. She doesn't see nor respects me as a grown adult man, anymore. As she continues to decline I am treated worse.
It said on her medical report Brain Atrophy, she was in a car accident and got T-boned, she head her head enough to get a headache, but did not get injured. I am her only child, and only family member, besides my wife here in our city.

She is obese and very unstable (wobbly) gets dizzy (broken ear drum). Either she can't remember to use a cane or it makes her look "old" but has fallen multiple times, in multiple places. I think being overweight has padded the falls. I have printed out a sign to Remind her keyes, cane, wallet.

When she had a car she would go to and from her storage to retrieve small boxes and had them all over the living room in a very unsafe manner. She said she was "looking for something" and had to go through her boxes to find it.

It turns out she did this for many years as a pastime, yet she complained that she had a mess. I would go help clean it up stack boxes neatly in a corner, date them and two days later it would look the same.

I figured she was losing her memory and every time she would open a new box it was like Christmas day, oh look I forgot I had these and she would repeat the process of Sorting the items all over the floors, tables, chairs again. So I brought her some waist-high folding tables so she could to do.

Her living looked like her Storage space on her recliner and t.v. were there. I got tired of playing warehouse man so I no longer said anything regarding Safety. I did remind her in a gentle way that it would be a good idea to "Leave a path" so she could walk. She fell a couple of times and got bruised, but no broken bones.

It's her life, but I don't have to be in it all the time. I don't "worry" about her safety anymore. These are her choices even if they make no sense to me. She has always been an independent woman and relied on No One.

What Emma wants, Emma gets and it's always been her way or the highway, the only thing different now is she is older, slower and meaner.

I called to remind her to pay her rent or she would be charged $100.00 late fee in her new apartment, new because she got evicted from the Independent Senior living apartments (bad attitude) but that's another story.

She told me she knew what she was doing and for me to get off her back and stay out of her life! Mind you I stay totally aware of the vocabulary I use and my tone of voice when I speak to her
(She's a Narc I'm trained not to upset her).

It's never demanding or demeaning. "It's just a friendly reminder Mom". When she told me to stay out of her life I replied, "Ok, I will" in a very compling voice, no sarcasm. (I'm just a boy doing what his mama's telling him to do).

She has plenty of people to advocate for her. They are all professionals from various organizations. She also has a therapist/s to speak to. Emma knows how to get what Emma wants/needs.

I have to "learn" to let the consequences happen to her, unfortunately, it's not easy for me. I just hope she remembers to pay her rent and doesn't get evicted from this new place because she blew it at the Senior independent luxury living place. They cater to seniors, but not if the staff continues to get verbally abused.

We can't help those who resist our help, even if we hold them in their best interest. It's their choice, their consequences. The poster is correct.
Angel from The Bay

The railing is a good idea! My brother’s house has a step down and I am not used to it. I can’t tell you how many times I have almost fallen in his home.

My mother rejected suggestions as well but I started with a few things like giving her a large tv for the wall in the living room for Christmas one year. She had been watching tv in a small, very cluttered study since it wasn’t wall mounted. She liked the idea of a larger set but wanted a painting there instead. We used the approach of “if you don’t like it we will have it moved” (though the installation was complex enough that I doubt we could). She now loves having it there. We have also been installing grab bars. I started with one on her tub. Now she can no longer get out of the tub even with them so she uses the shower. She has asked for more to be put in for use there. She had problems using a built in microwave because it was too high for her to reach. That meant that she used the stove more and would forget to turn it off. We got a counter top microwave for her even though she complained about it taking up counter space. She now uses it instead of the stove. We have a list of other things we plan to do eventually, one at a time so no change is overwhelming. Usually once she realizes that the little changes make life easier she tends to appreciate them and has been more open to our ideas. She has also started coming up with her own ideas. To try to do all at once would overwhelm and upset her. So far slow but steady is working with my mother!

I love the Bob and Brad guys. Had forgotten about them.

I could not agree more with your last paragraph. Modern medicine forces people to live longer with nightmare conditions than humans should. When I was a kid people died more normally -- average male death, 67; average female death, 72. When a person died at those ages they were considered to have had "good long lives." One way a lot of people went (including my father) was "the old person's friend" -- a very fast pneumonia. My father (who was in constant pain and essentially immobile) got sick, went into kind of a coma on the second day, and died unconscious on the third day. Now the instinct would be to rush him to the hospital, pump him full of antibiotics, use every machine available to stabilize heart condition, and finally send him home -- possibly with dementia, frequently physically handicapped and needing constant care...and they can go on that way for YEARS. Meanwhile the life of the caretaker and family is being destroyed and they may go bankrupt.

At some point when my hubby came home from the hospital he became aware that his bed had been moved downstairs and everything arranged so that he couldn't leave the ground floor. When he started to walk he immediately wanted to go upstairs. One son put one of those doggy gates at the bottom of the stairs. Finally when hubby was pretty stable I removed the gate, because he wanted so badly to go upstairs -- there was no real point to it, but it made him happy and he felt freer. As it happened, no accidents occurred, but I (and our doctor kind of agreed!) felt that if he, at 93 and with dementia, fell down the stairs and broke his neck or injured himself seriously enough to hasten death...that would not necessarily be bad, better than living to 100 with full dementia. I myself would instantly fly to Zürich if I found myself in the beginning of these conditions and was able to get on a plane.

Main point: maybe it isn't necessary to make everything absolutely and completely safe, especially if the LO doesn't want things that way. Do the sensible things (no cords running across open floors, grab bars in bathroom) but don't force the person into a constant power battle, sensible as it may be, over safety measures that the person doesn't want.

And, one doesn't want to wait for that first fall.
This isn't personal to you although we understand how you feel.

The issue is her mother's safety and well-being, regardless of her age.

Touchmatters, you mean very well. I don't know your age or health situation. However, as a 78-year-old single woman, I disagree that safety and (physical) well-being are always or even mostly what is best for someone else. I've lived my entire adult life making deliberate decisions to have the adventures I want to have regardless of whether there is risk involved. That doesn't mean I take thousands of risks, but I pick and choose what I want to be careful about. I have gone hundreds of places alone at night with only a couple of minor bad experiences, and I wouldn't change my adventures for anything.

Similarly, while I've made some safety modifications in my living situations, there are some things that matter to me enough aesthetically that I'd rather keep them in place than change them to a safer arrangement. I do have two excellent healthcare POAs who are mandated in my advance directives to intervene if/when I have dementia and if I'm doing something really crazy. But overall, my independence has been and continues to be more important to me than my safety or physical well-being. I feel fortunate that I don't have anyone in my life who will try to interfere with my chosen way of life!

You may want to make a Fire TV so that she can easily control it with her voice or you could schedule shows for her using Alexa Routines

If you are doing unsafe things like trying to go upstairs with a walker, then it appears that you may need help with your own care. Walkers are definitely not meant for stairs. I put in a stair lift for my mother when she was at home, and it was surprisingly much less expensive than I thought it would be--definitely much less expensive than hospital and follow-up care bills due to a fall. Even if there are no broken bones from a fall, there will be bruising. When older people fall, they are more susceptible to blood clots, which can then lead to strokes and heart attacks.
People who have raised children did so with numerous decisions that were made in the name of safety, good health, good sense, and love. And these decisions were made often against the wishes of the child. Just because someone is an adult, that doesn't mean that they know what they are doing and are taking good care of themselves.
My life is a nightmare right now because my mother did not take proper care of herself. She should have gone to physical therapy after her stroke in her 50's. She did not. She did not ever go to the doctors. She developed a hunchback, and then was popping ibuprofen like it was candy. No doctors. She was getting worse and worse heartburn and was going thru bottle after bottle of otc heartburn remedies, No doctor. She thought that once-a-week bowel movements was normal. No doctors. Well, all of the above proved to be very toxic for her liver and kidneys. And she basically had a hypothyroidism breakdown. The resulting mental fog that ensued was so bad, we thought that she had another stroke, and she was hospitalized. No stroke. My sister made them check it twice. The non-pooping turned out to be from a hiatal hernia, which she then had surgery to fix. If she had simply gone to the doctor years earlier, she might have fixed that years earlier and not toxified herself so much that her thyroid crapped out.
My sister, who still lived in our home town, moved back in with our mother to care for her. The stress was so bad that she literally lost her mind. I then had to remove my mother from her home, and put her into assisted living. She cried when we were wheeling her to the car to leave the house. I have not taken her back to the house for any visits because I don't want to take her back to the home she never wanted to leave in the first place.
My mother, even after her first stroke, did not prepare for anything. No life insurance, no will, no advanced care directive, so I am having to do all of that now, plus a POA, so that I can do everything I need to do for my mother without asking for permission for every single thing.
In addition to my mother, I now have my mentally ill sister to worry about. Do you know what you can do for mentally ill loved ones that don't want mental health care? NOTHING, except watch them destroy themselves and everything around them. I have submitted 4 petitions for an involuntary psych eval pickup and have been denied 4 times, because 'I don't have a clear case for her being a danger to herself and others.' The real reason is that the city doesn't have enough money to care for unensured, unemployable people.
THEREFORE-- ADULT CHILDREN--THE MORAL OF THIS STORY IS--Do what you need to do to properly care for your aging parents. And if their feelings get a little bit hurt in the process while they are getting used to losing their independence, then so be it. Because the bad consequences that can happen if you don't do what needs to be done can snowball very quickly and make your life a living hell. Also, HAVE A PLAN B. My sister taking care of my mother at home was a hasty plan A. That plan fell thru, and now I have an even worse problem to worry about.