Have you tried to talk to your folks about their future and how you will be able to care for them as they age? Are you encountering resistance and denial? Are you the only one in your family who wants to face and plan for the future? Are you frustrated?
These are all typical emotions when we're dealing with the aging process. Some parents are fabulous: organized with their finances and their estate planning, even deciding to move to a retirement community and taking care of their funeral arrangements so their children don't have to worry.
Parents on the other extreme ignore everything. They don't draw up a will and plan to die quietly in their home. Like that's going to happen.
Most of our parents lie somewhere along the continuum of the extremes. Your parents may have drawn up a will and revocable living trust, but haven't fully faced the necessary issues of the challenges that can arise while they're ALIVE: declining health, Medicare and other necessary insurance, hospitalizations, nursing homes. All possibilities for each one of us.
Many families don't know what they don't know. That's where we come in. There are lots of free resources here at LoveYourParents.com to help you learn all you can about the aging process and how to help your folks prepare. Check out our archived articles on the topics most important to you now.
Feel free to email a question, and please be sure to sign up for our FREE Love Your Parents Newsletter coming out August 17. Each issue will be packed with tips and articles to help you love and care for your aging parents, preparing and encouraging you each step of the way. If you would like personalized advice and strategies, we offer consulting services as well, designed for the individual circumstances you personally face.
We're in this together: loving our parents and helping get them the best possible care through the end of their lives, overcoming the challenges and pitfalls we face today in an era of economic and healthcare crises.
But be encouraged: There is a traveled path for your journey and hope along the way.
2 comments:
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My mother is not well and her husband has very bad dimetia. I live with them now and am the caregiver for them. Yes I feel very guilty I did not do something better with my life. I knew this would happen some day. I guess I could have found a man, a life after divorce. I had teenagers who still needed me. I knew someday this would happen and it is here now. I feel very alone,
ageing and my mother puts her husband first as always. He is demanding, has dimentia and needs help all day. She is not well. I do not want to go into the problems because
I pray for a miracle all the time for her. I am not ready to loose my mother but I do know it will come. I still want her to get better and we can have a few more moments of happiness.
Their is not much happiness here except for traveling to the market, going shopping across the street. She buys me things. I want no things I want my mom to get better. I want her to achknowledge about her husband. I want him to go first so I do not have to deal with him
if something happened to my mother. I could not deal with it!
I guess I will have to ask her tomorrow, but it will make her feel more sick to think about these things. I drink alot but I take care of them very well! I feel I do not know how I can live without my mother. I thought this another time when I lost my grandmother because she raised us, but I had a husband then and children to raise. Now they are grown and I have no partner. I do feel very alone except for my faith. That has sustained me through all.
Any positive sugesstions are welcome.
TeriV
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