Dealing With an Aging Parent’s Alcohol Problem

What a family learned after it had a long-delayed, hard conversation about substance abuse

Yvonne Mirilovich came home from work in January 2016 and found her mother drunk while babysitting her two young daughters.

“I just lost it. I screamed at her. I called her a monster. She just stared at me with a blank face,” says Yvonne, who is 39 and lives in Limerick, Pa. She told her mother, then 64, that she wanted her out of the house and not around her children.

“That...