How to Talk About Caregiving with Your Aging Parents
July 24th, 2009
It’s unofficially eldercare week here at Working Parents. This guest post is written by Julie Davis, the managing editor at Parentgiving.com, a web resource for boomers and their aging parents.
They sat you down for the talk when you were a kid. Now it’s time to return the favor.
Unfortunately, many of us would rather talk about sex with mom and dad than the topic of this conversation: their plans for managing the last act of their lives—where they hope to live, who will care for them if they can’t take care of their daily needs, how they will pay for assisted living if they are unable to stay in their home.
These are not easy questions to ask. The more independent-minded your parents, the less comfortable they might feel sharing this information with you. And your interest may be misinterpreted as butting in, especially if you show up with all the answers.
You may not even be ready for the talk yourself. Some of us still think of our parents as there to take care of us in a crisis and haven’t yet wrapped our minds around to the possibility of our having to care for them. I certainly haven’t. When, in the course of three months, I had to have emergency surgery, replace our home’s water well pump, learned our dog had to have a tumor removed along with the toe it was growing on and had our daughter come back from college for a summer internship only to find out she had to have all four wisdom teeth out immediately, I cried uncle (except it sounded more like “Daddy”).
Another reason this conversation is hard to have is because it forces everyone involved to acknowledge that there are end-of-life issues to address, the possibility of a disabling illness and the certainty of death. As much as we wish it for ourselves and for our parents, we won’t all be blessed with a long healthy life during which we stay relatively functional until the day when we peacefully pass away in our sleep, right next to the envelope with all the necessary documents our heirs will need to settle our estate which, in this perfect scenario, won’t have been decimated by home health care bills or years at a nursing home.
Compounding the awkwardness, the best time to sit down and learn about your parents’ wishes and the provisions they might have made is when it feels the most inopportune: when everything is fine, when you think, “Knock on wood, they’re doing great—I’m not going to jinx it.” The worst time is when the inevitable crisis happens and you are the proverbial deer in the headlights. A crisis comes in many shapes and sizes, from an Alzheimer’s diagnosis to the call from a hospital admitting manager telling you your parent is in intensive care following a stroke, a fall, a heart attack.
Parentgiving.com was started because the founders had crises with parents and had to make snap decisions. They couldn’t easily find all the resources they needed in that instant. And when you’re operating in panic mode you don’t have the luxury of being sure you evaluated all the options and made all the best decisions.
Are your parents old enough for the talk? The short answer is, if you’re old enough to be reading this, they’re old enough for this kind of conversation. And there are compelling reasons to talk about future issues now. The sooner a plan is in place, the more time there is to figure out the costs and how to fund it. The reality is most people have no idea just how expensive living longer is.
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