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My friend Jessie, for instance, turned 60 this year. Twice divorced, she directs a small nonprofit foundation at a private college a thousand miles distant from the small town where she grew up. Jessie's father died in 1978, and her mother, at 95, still lives in the family home. Jessie's brother lives with her; he moved in after re turning from combat in Vietnam. A bachelor, he spends a good part of every day drinking at the local VFW.
Jessie either flies or drives across three states to visit her mother several times a year. On her last visit, she found the house filthy and the yard overgrown with weeds. Stacks of bills mixed with advertising flyers spilled off the dining table. She had hardly set down her suitcase before the phone rang.
"Welcome home," her brother said. "I'm at a motel. There's an extra key on the window sill over the kitchen sink. Just put it back there when you leave. I need a break."
A neighbor confided to Jessie that her mother might not be getting enough to eat, so Jessie arranged for a woman to come in every day, do some cleaning, and make Jell-O and soup for her mother. Jessie did not discuss this arrangement with her brother. She fears he might resent her interference, and in the past he has refused to use his mother's money to hire help. So Jessie sends a check every month to the neighbor who pays the housekeeper.
My friend Florence, also divorced, sees after the needs of her father and widowed stepfather, both in their eighties. Her father has, for the past 50 years, lived alone in Houston until last year. Long before his health and memory began to decline, he made both his daughters swear they would never take him into their homes. But after his second minor car accident, Florence moved him into an apartment about ten minutes from her house and hired a college student to drive for him and help him with shopping. On most days, her father still thinks he's living in Houston.
She has taken him to the hospital emergency room twice so far, both times for cuts he got in falls. For the past two weeks she has gone twice a day to change the dressing on an abscessed cyst on his back.
"Why not get a home health-care nurse to do that?" I ask.
"He wouldn't let a stranger in the door," she says. "And for Daddy, even the same nurse would be a stranger every time."
Florence pays the bills and arranges doctor appointments for both her father and her stepfather who has survived a stroke. Florence has durable power-of-attorney for both her charges and keeps the documents handy in the glove compartment of her car, along with the "Directive to Physicians" specifying that they are not to be put on life-support systems.
I have similar papers now for both my parents. Jim, the rector at my church, advised me, soon after I re turned to care for my parents, to arrange not only for durable power- of-attorney, which would allow me to handle their financial affairs, but also power-of-attorney for health care. As the elder of two sons, Jim had learned this lesson the hard way a decade earlier when his father, sinking into dementia, had to be admitted to a nursing home.
"But your mother is still alive. Why didn't she handle it?" I asked.
"She just refused to deal with it. She was simply overwhelmed, so she tried to ignore the situation, even though it was dangerous for both of them," he said, shaking his head. "I had to go before the judge to get my father declared in competent before I could get him into a place where he'd be taken care of adequately. You don't want to have to go through that trauma if you can possibly avoid it."
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