Posts tagged with "elderly parent"

Do you know the realities in caring for an elderly parent?

WOCM host Bulldog asks, “What are the 9 Realities in a nutshell?”

You’ve answered the call to come home and care for your elderly parent until the very end. These 9 Realities will answer your next question, “Now what?” In case you want to hear it LIVE, here is the link to my interview on the Bulldog Show.

Reality 1- The House is a Wreck, Inside and Out. Being there is most important for the adult child to assess the safety of the home, and the wellness of your parent.

Reality 2- Fiercely Independent but Can’t Cook, Drive, or Bathe. There is a lot a senior can do to put up pretenses that everything is fine. There are criteria for making sure your elder is not suffering from neglect.

Reality 3- Getting Your Physical Home and Your Financial House in Order. Purging vs. preserving memories, and how to set up a filing system for finances that are in desperate need of organizing. These are motivating pages that have readers squaring away their own homes today.

Reality 4- Managing Health–Both Medical and Financial– is a Second Full-Time Job. Knowing what medication your parent takes, along with dosages, is critical for every doctor appointment. How to create a prescription chart for doctors and ease of renewals is covered in this chapter.

Reality 5- When Your Home and Your Parent Begin Falling Apart, Get Prepared. Warning signs that your parent is at the beginning of the end can no longer be ignored. And such is life, when everything is going downhill, the decades old home is also in decline. Know where your assets are held. Expenses are coming.

Reality 6- A Birth Allows us Nine Months to Prepare; Death Has No Timeline; Act with Urgency in All You Do. A death march will take its toll on the caregiver. While you nervously watch your parent wrestle against an illness, this begins your gut-wrenching experience, as if everything leading up wasn’t hard enough.

Reality 7- The Critical Role Bowel Movements and Bed Sores Will Play in the End. Going home….it’s all she longed for. Straddling two worlds as patients get ready to cross over leaves them busily preparing before they feel ready to be un-entwined from this life. The secret of what she saw on the other side was never revealed. But I now know what death looks like in the final weeks, days, and hours.

Reality 8- A Preplanned Funeral Is a Gift to Your Family; Binders, and Lots of Them, Are an Executor Trustee’s Gift. The funeral playbook and how to establish a binder system for Communications, Estate Assets, and Legal Documents will make this your indispensable guide.

Reality 9- Do Everything You Can To Self-Sooth, but Include Grief Counseling; You Need It More Than You Think. Compartmentalizing grief seems the easier route. When the crying jag ends, we think we’re over the loss. This is not true for the frontline caregiver for whom it will take years to process the experience.

Media Appearances

Did You Know that Many Adult Children Caring for an Elderly Parent Have Very Similar Stories to Tell? Listen in to what callers had to share.

San Francisco/KTVU-Bay Area People with Lisa Yokota KTVU podcast

San Francisco/KGO-The Ronn Owens Show

San Francisco/KQED-Forum with Michael Krasny KQED podcast

Seattle, WA/KISW-Conversations with Lizz Sommars podcast

Ocean City, MD/WOCM FM 98.1- Bulldog Show podcast

Abilene, TX/KXYL-FM 102.3- Going Home with Mark Cope

Omaha, NE/KMA 960- Dean and Don Show

Albuquerque, NM/KDAZ- Birga and Dan Show

Waterbury, CT/WATR- Larry Rifkin Talk of the Town

Burlington, IA/KBUR- Steve Hexom Morning Show

Milwaukee, WI/WBEV- The Idea Exchange with Brenda Murphy

Bristol County, VA/Tri-Cities, TN/WFHG- Barbara McFaddin Show

9 Realities of Caring For An Elderly Parent: A Love Story of a Different Kind

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You moved home to care for your elderly parent, now what? Your answer is here.

It became clear to me when I returned home for a visit with my elderly mother that there would be no escaping the question of what to do about Mom. The time had come, the signs were obvious. She could no longer manage to be alone in her big home. The chores, the mail, the bills, the lawn, the cats, the care of what needed to go into her, had all gotten to be too much for her to handle on her own.

After seeing the condition of each bedroom, four of them being used as attics, along with her Master which was a perfect picture in a “before and after” makeover scenario, hers being the “before”, it took me only a weekend of uncoiling messes left behind from ants, cats, and other critters to realize that I would be the one who would become caregiver for our mother.

We all knew her greatest wish was to remain in her own home for the duration. Looking into her worried pale blue eyes, there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t give to keep her feeling safe in her home and well cared for the rest of her years ahead, so I gave up everything to move back into my childhood home.

My mind began racing with questions: How to purge a home filled with decades of clutter, while preserving childhood memories? How to make her money last and where are all her assets? What is this filing system of hers that keeps mail tucked under beds and stuffed into shoeboxes on shelves? What legal documents are still not in place? Is she being forgetful, or are we dealing with the warning signs of something worse? What are her wishes to be carried out beyond her death? What would make her happiest today?

And much later, I would be asking other questions. How can I make her comfortable? How much time do we have? How can I possibly say goodbye?

I wish someone had prepared me for what I experienced in this undertaking. I would have still said yes to the job, but I would have had a better idea of what the job entailed. Nobody says yes to Firefighting, or Nursing, or the FBI, or the Army without asking a few questions up front about what a typical day at work is like. Yes, it was stressful. Yes, it was also joyful. Yes, it was scary, and hard, absolutely the hardest bullet point I can now list under work experience. Yes, it was my privilege. Yes, I did it because I knew no one else could or would, and because I believed my father would have wanted to know his beloved wife of fifty-four years was not going to have to go it alone.

The realities of what I learned are chronicled in my second book, a non-fiction narrative called 9 Realities of Caring for an Elderly Parent: A Love Story of a Different Kind. Slated for release in August 2013, this is a funny, compassionate, and daunting account of what you can expect if you are the adult child coming home to care for your elderly parent until the very end.

Designed to be an indispensable guide, it will help you through nine chapters dealing with early topics like keeping your parent safe in their own home, to middle chapters centering on waiting for death and the important role that bowel movements and bedsores will play in the end. The final third of the book deals with the aftermath, including funeral arrangements that are pre-designed, and managing as executor of the estate. Grief counseling for the adult orphan is the last chapter.

I am so sorry you have to go through it. But, my intention in writing this is that it will be a support to you if you have no other.

Blog question: What do you wish you had known before assuming the role as caregiver to your elderly parent?

Sobering Statistics in Elder Care

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Are you worried about providing elder care for your senior parents?

Let’s open with some sobering statistics that you cannot ignore for much longer. The number of people caring for an aging parent has soared in the past 15 years, according to MetLife. In 1994, 3 percent of men, and 9 percent of women, helped with basic care for an aging parent; In 2008, these numbers increased to 17 percent of men, and 28 percent of women providing help which is defined as dressing, feeding, bathing, and other personal care needs. This goes well beyond grocery shopping, driving parents to appointments, and helping them with financial matters. And it is more stressful as well. In 2011, nearly 10 million adult children over the age of 50 provided this care for an aging parent.

In a deeper look at options available for seniors with limited finances who cannot stay in their own home because they are unable to care for themselves anymore, USA Today reports that most families are unprepared for the news that Medicare doesn’t pay for long-term care. The median cost of a year in a private room at a nursing home in 2011 was $77,745, according to Genworth. Assisted Living is another option, but it’s also not cheap and isn’t covered by Medicaid. The national median cost in 2011 was $39,135, by Genworth’s count. With 90 percent of elderly parents preferring to stay at home, from AARP research, families are left with the agonizing question of who will be stepping up to care for Mom or Dad.

As more people live into their 90’s, most of us will face caregiving responsibilities, or need caregiving ourselves. AARP says 45 million Americans perform some kind of caregiving. After A. Barry Rand, CEO of AARP, experienced caring for his own elderly father, he began addressing the daunting problem of caregiving by building the AARP Caregiving Resource Center in January 2012 where caregivers can come together to find experts and advice through local agencies. What starts out as just helping our parent can quickly turn into a full-time job.

I was not at all thinking the job would fall to me. Until it did.

I had no idea the call was coming, but my mother’s invitation to visit opened my eyes to the pitfalls of seniors living alone in a home they can no longer manage. It was enough for me to uproot my life to fulfill her wish that she live out the rest of her years in her own home.

No one prepared me for this undertaking and what I learned has become the subject of my new book 9 Realities of Caring For An Elderly Parent: A Love Story of A Different Kind, a funny, compassionate account of your daunting role if you are the adult child coming home to care for your elderly parent until the very end. Released August 2013 and available at amazon.com/kindle.

Blog question: How did your life change when you took on the role of caring for your elderly parent?

Who will be taking care of Mom or Dad?

Still Got Your Head Stuck In The Sand When It Comes To Senior Care?

Have you been avoiding the nagging thought of what will happen when your mom or dad can no longer care for themselves? This is a question plaguing more than 45 million of us this year, according to AARP in an article from November 2012.

As more people live into their nineties, most of us will face caregiving responsibilities, or need caregiving ourselves. This can include meal preparation for older or impaired adult relatives or friends. Maybe you are the thoughtful neighbor taking lasagna to the woman who lives alone at the end of your block. Do you know how she is eating the rest of the week? Maybe you are the friend who takes her to the grocery store once a week because she can no longer drive. Do you know how she is preparing meals?

Maybe you are the adult child who lives nearby, popping in twice a week. When you leave, do you know if she has a tendency to nap while the kettle has been left abandoned on the stove to melt all over the burners again? Who will be taking care of your elderly mom or dad? Sadly, this is not a job for the faint of heart. Or the neighbors. Or even the best friends.

There is a lot that goes on behind closed doors that neighbors and well-meaning friends cannot see. Most adult children cannot even recognize when their parent’s needs require a different kind of care. We are so accustomed to our parents fixing everything for us there is a sense of denial taking over. We don’t want to “see” the condition that our parent is living in if the cats they love so dearly have become more than they can manage, as evidenced by the little piles of defecation hidden in corners of the living room. If we become aware, then we need to be part of a solution, and this is scary because our lives are about to change dramatically.

These nine realities come from my new Memoir, 9 Realities of Caring For An Elderly Parent: A Love Story Of A Different Kind, released August 2013 and taken from my personal experience in caring for my mother during the last five years of her life. They are the bits of advice no one prepared me for in this undertaking that I learned the hard way. I share them here with you in a funny and compassionate account of what you can expect from your daunting role if you are the adult child coming home to care for your elderly parent until the very end.

Blog question: What was your first clue your mom or dad needed care?