When You Promise To Care For A Parent, one Daughter’s Story

This is my story to be shared in the hope that other families will have the opportunity to plan properly in advance for a loved one’s Long Term Care needs. My mother was uninsurable years before I got into this industry as a Long Term Care Insurance Specialist, unfortunately. She gave of herself to keep my grandmother home during her final months of life I the mid 1960’s when she needed intense care – fulfilling that age-old promise of not putting a loved one in a nursing home; and, so, I made the same commitment to my own mother 40 years later.

My mother’s health history was shaky, and years before she passed we built a mother-in-law apartment onto our home. It was a perfect picture of a well-balanced family; we all got along well, especially since Mom had her own exterior entrance to come and go as she pleased with a second door to shut us off from the main house when she’d had enough of our girls! I am so grateful to have had my mother living with us during her last 4 years of life. My mother’s assets that remained at the time of her care need was but a small emergency fund to cover final expenses, funeral luncheon, etc. My husband and I were paying for college for 2 of our 3 daughters at the time. So, we were definitely buried within the sandwich generation.

How Mom’s Care Needs Played Out

I’m first going to share with you how I had WISHED my mother’s care experience had played out, then how it really played out . . . . Each morning I’d have my coffee with her nurse reviewing how her night went and greeting my mother with a loving hug in the morning, spending quality time with her watching her favorite movies, serving her lunch, and reviewing all the family pictures; then taking a break while her nurse helped her with a bath, all changing and lifting. I would, however, do her hair, and then we would continue reviewing memories and family stories and greeting visitors that came to say their final farewells.

The reality was that I had taken an unpaid leave of absence from my employer 6 months before her passing and lived off of savings, forfeited employer contributions to my 401(k), and while the last few weeks of my mother’s care needs intensified, I caught myself in a position where I had to do lifting which created a few compressed discs in my back. Hopsice would have paid for my mother to be in a facility and only a little help at home, but not the kind of help she needed daily, which I where I came in.

We’d already decided to keep her out of a facility and keep her home like she had done for my grandmother. It was my promise. The last week or so I wasn’t aware that I subconsciously didn’t want to leave her side even when I had to go to the bathroom. I didn’t realize that I wasn’t eliminating fully and unknowingly was cramping and I couldn’t eliminate creating a substantial back-up in my system and narrowly missed severe kidney damage, according to what showed up in testing within the year after my mom’s death. My husband and I had to lift my mother off the floor up onto the hospital bed (higher than regular bed) one night after she had decided she was undressing and leaving to go on a trip, which stressed his already bad back and further aggravating my compression problem.

I was the one who had to administer the anti-anxiety drugs so she would start to relax to the point where she wouldn’t keep trying to get out of bed, then upping dosage to keep her comfortable. To be totally honest, I am a very strong woman, but doing that to my own mother was psychologically distressing to me, seriously. In the end she slipped into coma while I played her favorite movies and music. I read the Hospice book weeks before hand and subconsciously knew what was happening, but was so traumatized that I didn’t want to admit that my mother was slipping away before my own eyes. I thought we had more time.

Impact On My Health, Income and Assets

While a loved one’s passing is traumatic for anyone, I hope you’ll take this story the way it was intended, which is to share with you the true burden, from a daughter’s perspective — what it really means – REAL WORLD – when the daughter makes the commitment to a parent that they won’t ever put Mom or Dad into a nursing home.

There is financial software that analyzes the future value of the income loss I realized, the 401(k) contributions I didn’t make, the employer matching 401(k) contributions that didn’t happen, the loss of income after my Mom’s passing that occurred because I just couldn’t function for a full 6 months, and then ramping up my commission only career back up also took time. The future value to my commitment to my mother came to me at a cost of $302,987 which represents those financial ramifications calculated forward at an average rate of return of 8% from age 44 to age 66 years. If we ever meet, I do carry a copy of that software calculation with me if you’d like to see it. The financial loss to my and my husband’s retirement years of $302,987 plus my compressed disk and kidney/bladder malfunction episode and the psychological trauma are my scars of having cared for my mother, whom I loved so very much.

I Would Have Chosen Differently

I didn’t have choices though because her lack of assets, no long term care insurance and my not having disposable income or assets to pay for her care. If faced with the same circumstances today, now knowing what I do, I probably would have said ‘yes’ to the Hospice facility my mother urged me to consider, even though it would have meant commuting to see my mother those last several weeks and not fulfilling that promise. So I am sharing this story to help some of my readers take their blinders off, literally. You see, I still meet many retirees who use the excuse that one of their adult children will take care of them when they need care, for the reason why they should not look at transferring part or all of the risk of long term care expenses.

Our Responsibility To Provide For Ourselves

I believe, passionately, that we all have a responsibility to provide for our future care needs.  If we don’t plan to transfer some of the risk using long term care insurance, then we must self-insurance and pay for own care costs, even if that means using up the money we intended to pass down to our family.  We all deserve to live with dignity, independently through our last days and not be a burden on our loved onces.

I believe that if we have been blessed financially that we consider including covering extended family members with long term care insurance plans as a loving gift . No one person would ever knowingly subject themselves to the physical, emotional and financial burdens of caring for another — if they had, beforehand, — choices to do otherwise or supplement the loving care that only they as family members could provide. Not until they see the dozens upon dozens of families go on claim needing to activate their long term care policies like I have (which families I am honored to have assisted), no one truly understands what it means to physically care for a loved one unless they’ve done just that.

Many of my clients have cared for their spouses and that seems more natural, but still there is a burden there as well, for which long term care services can be provided by those trained to lift properly, trained to assist in the home with bathing, dressing, feeding, toileting, transferring and continence issues, are there to provide support services such as laundry, housekeeping, food preparation, errands, etc.

More importantly is the possibility of running so low on assets after paying for long term care for one spouse, that the surviving spouse is left in a financial hardship!

Fast forward a few years later and my passion in assisting others as a Long Term Care Insurance Planning Specialist is much more fulfilling than it was prior to my having had the experience of caring for my mother. Every day I help protect loved ones and feel I am blessed to help families this way.