AITAH For Trying to Evict My Terminally Ill Roommate?
In May 2025 I (20F) moved in to this house with three other women- (24F) (22F) (53F), our fifth roommate having just moved away. Our 53F roommate has some major health conditions: brain cancer, lung cancer, and colon cancer. She’s done so much chemotherapy, radiation, and other treatments and has beat her original life expectancy by 18 months. She’s truly incredible and her story is so inspirational.
Here’s the catch- she’s 100% alone. Her parents have passed, her husband left years before she moved into our home, her children don’t talk to her and while some of her sisters are still in contact they’re not involved. She’s been living alone battling all of these health problems all by herself. Which, and I cannot overstate this, is truly admirable.
That being said, she’s on several highly addictive prescription opioids for pain. That, mixed with the chronic fatigue from her conditions, means that she sleeps 20-22 hours per day. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is paying for her rent and providing for her food. The food they bring her has to be prepared, which she isn’t well enough to do. The food they bring her rots and we (the other roommates) end up tossing it. She orders all her food from Amazon, and it’s almost always things like ice cream, applesauce, chocolate milk, candy, and other non-nutritious foods.
She’s on disability, but they don’t pay her much because she has “assets,” two broken down cars that take up much needed parking space in our garage. She has so much old or broken furniture and unbuilt or half-finished projects cluttered around the garage and the house. Her boxes and packages pile up around the house, in the corners of main living spaces and crowding the walkways.
In September, her family dropped off upwards of 30 boxes of family photos, memories, heirlooms, and other stuff. They wanted her to go through it and upload stuff, or possibly store it long term. Those boxes have sat in our living room until last month when I moved them so I could replace our couch (with the consent of our landlord, I’ve been trying to update our furniture and decor to feel a bit more modern and coherent). She has moved all those boxes into one of her broken down cars and they will likely stay there for the foreseeable future.
She has the master in our home, which has its own bathroom. She’s been using the bathroom that the other four tenants share since October because her toilet is broken. She won’t let anyone in to her room to fix it because she’s embarrassed about the state if her living space: it is covered from floor to ceiling in furniture, crafts, boxes, food, clothes, dirty dishes, and who the heck knows what else.
In November she was experiencing some pretty serious syncope and kept falling as a result. She ended up taking an ambulance to the hospital to get checked out. While she was there, some of our neighbors came to help clear out her room- throw away the boxes and trash, remove her hundreds of dishes from the bathtub, and help her sort through her things. Due to her colon cancer she’s been on adult diapers- they found trash bags of used diapers that she hadn’t been able to throw out. Her bathroom had been walled off using duct tape and plastic.
They tried getting her a social worker but she refused to work with them. Every offer of support she receives she either denies or “accepts” and never followed up on. I’m far from a neat, clean person, but I do like to keep things at least livable and presentable. Every time I do anything to try and fix / improve / update our house, or help her with any of her multitude of projects, issues, or other things, she gets verbally aggressive and really upset. She’s shown signs of pretty severe psychosis, as well as manic episodes.
The neighbors that she’s in contact with have seen her abusing her opioid patches and, with the hoarding that is abundant both in her room and around her house, these behaviors are cause for concern. She’s been the longest tenant in our home because nobody else wants to live with her. She’s incredibly high maintenance and needs constant help and supervision from her roommates- which shouldn’t be any of our responsibilities.
She’s asked me personally for financial help, but then won’t accept any money. She‘s asked me for help fixing and selling her car, but doesn’t want to list it until she does x, y, and z. She’s asked for help sorting and organizing her stuff, but is livid whenever I touch her stuff even when she’s sitting right there with me trying to go through it.
I’ve called APS for her, but they won’t do it because they tried getting a social worker for her and nothing came of her. The neighbors are working with the bishop to help make changes but it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere. I want to get her an assessment to see if her medicaid will help her qualify for a live in facility, but there’s no way she’ll consent to anything like that. I’m truly concerned for her and want her to get the care she needs.
I enjoy talking to her when she’s lucid- she went to school for the same thing I’m working on right now and we love talking shop. Before she got sick, she used to engage in a lot of hobbies I currently enjoy and we chat about shared interests. We were good friends and would often share meals and work on projects together. Now she’s asleep so frequently and so irate / anxious / incoherent when she’s awake that it’s been really difficult to try and interact with her.
She truly believes that she can take care of herself and live on her own, and while she’s done an amazing job given her current capacity and resources, she’s really not able to live on her own or take care of herself. She’s a danger to herself; the situations she puts herself in and the emergencies she creates causes a lot of strain on the lives of everyone around her.
I truly care about her and have done my best to help her for the past year, but due to my own job, school, health, and family, I can’t live with her anymore. I don’t think she’ll ever get the help she needs unless she truly has no other option. Her kids, sisters, friends, neighbors, previous tenants, and our landlord have all tried reasoning with her, grown tired of fighting her, and have since given up. I believe that she’s in violation of her lease given the damage she’s done to the property and will be reaching out to the landlord about her here in the next few days or weeks to see what can be done for her.