On the eBird page for the Carolina Parakeet, the plaque next to the specimen in the photo references the Carolina's "close relative, the extinct Louisiana Paraquet." I've never heard of this bird before, and looking it up, I can't find any information on it. Is it now considered to have been a subspecies of Carolina Parakeet? What did it look like?
Hi all, my grandma and grandpa both have dementia. I've been living with them for about a year and a half now to take care of them. My grandma started out doing much better cognitively than her husband, but over the time I've been here, she's taken multiple steps down cognitively while my grandpa has been mostly stable. She is mostly aware that her husband has dementia, but she's never really grasped what that means or that his ability to do certain tasks is completely gone (eg, she still expects him to hang pictures on the wall--even though it takes him hours of standing there doing nothing if I don't step in and do it myself). My grandpa has no idea either of them have it.
They've always had an... interesting dynamic in their relationship, in which she controls both of their lives and frequently makes snide remarks towards him. Over the past couple of months though, this has gotten a lot worse. She'll say mean things to him every night before they go to bed, make jokes about him being stupid, get snappy at him for taking out his hearing aids but then not actually tell him that's the reason she's upset when he asks what he did wrong. They also have a new dynamic where he'll ask her a question she can no longer answer (such as where the vacuum is stored in the house), and she gets rude and snappy at him for asking instead of just saying "I don't know."
It makes me so sad to see how much my grandpa loves his wife. He always apologizes even when he doesn't know what he did wrong, compliments her multiple times a day, tells her he loves her, etc, and she just gives him nothing but vitriol and exasperation back.
I'm very close to my grandma, but things have always been pretty awkward between my grandpa and I--even living together, we still don't really talk much. My grandma has always had a persecution complex, and I've tried to tell her to tone it down before, but she just turns herself into the victim and starts complaining about me "picking sides."
They're going to be moving into assisted living by the end of the summer and I'm worried it'll be even worse between them when I'm not around. Is there anything else I can do about this aside from talking to my grandma, which doesn't work?