I'm not doing this to my kid
Putting future wishes in writing now.
13 years ago, I spent the summer in Chengdu, Sichuan, China, teaching finance in a summer program at Southwest Jiaotong University. One day, I was talking to one of my students about family, and she said that she felt so sorry for old people in the United States because their families didn’t take care of them.
You don’t understand, I said. Our older relatives all want to be independent and don’t want people to help them. It causes a lot of frustration.
Right now, I am dealing with elderly relatives whose quality of life is poor because they have insisted on staying in their house, which is not close to their nearest relative and which is in a car dependent, distant suburb. Several of my friends are dealing with something similar.
Whether in Illinois or Ohio, Massachusetts or Florida, the story is the same: The elders do not want to move. They insist that everything is fine and that the paramedics are happy to come out whenever someone falls and can’t get up. They won’t go to the emergency room with severe chest pain because they are afraid that the ER doctors won’t release them back home. They rave about their swell neighbors who stop by for coffee every morning, not knowing that those same neighbors have called family members to say that these elders are not safe living by themselves and that these neighbors, while kind people, are not interested in becoming caregivers.
So what to do? Go to court and demand guardianship? Go tough love and cut them off until they hit rock bottom? Watch people become pathetic in their declining years, despite having resources that would give them alternatives? In every case that I am thinking of, the elders have resources and/or relatives who are willing to help.
All I know is that I will not do this to my own kid. I wrote out a note:
Will I honor it when he presents it to me, at some day in the next several years? I hope so.
Any other suggestions? Please share in the comments. You would be helping so many people.
Some related posts:
Meant to leave that comment here:
I’ve told my kids to do what’s most convenient for THEM if I cannot make decisions for myself, but I have also had the conversation about how to not be a burden. I was w 9 of my college GFs last week and caring for aging parents was a big topic—as was the line, “Remember not to do this to your children.”
Great topic! Future me would laugh at that scrap of paper. Imagine being presented with that now... because that's how you'll feel then. You'll feel it's absurdly early and you're fully capable. But the fact that what you wrote is so sparse ("move me"...where?), points to the ambivalence we all feel placing ourselves in the elder parent's shoes. I would expect a mult-page document with criteria ("when my doctor deems me longer safe to live alone") and thoughts on what type of care and financing the care. This really has got me thinking!