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those of you with elderly parents 800 miles away, how do you take care of them? (linux.community)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by vestmoria@linux.community to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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my parents live alone 800 miles away from me and are capable of living independently.

There might be a day they're not safe at home anymore and need to be taken care of.

I'm not a caregiver and while my father is flexible and can adapt, my mother is very strict with what she considers right and it's usually her way or the highway, reason why I would never live with her, let her live with me or take care of her alone. It would never work. My parents have a decent pension, no debt, and mostly love each other.

If it ever comes to me taking care of the administrative side of things 800 miles away, what does it look like? If you are in a situation like I described, how often do you visit?

Do you take care of them physically as well? I mean giving them showers, cleaning them, cleaning the house, feeding them, organizing their medicines, dressing them, answering 30 times per day the same question or old story because they forgot, because realistically I can do this up to 2 weeks per year, never on a permanent basis. I'm not a patient man.

I also want to live my life but where I grew up, small town in GA, the expectation seems to be I move in with my parents to physically take care of them, otherwise I'm not a good son.

ETA: thank you all for contributing

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[–] SJSmith@lemmy.zip 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

My parents lived on their own hundreds of miles from me. My father passed away. My mom was able to manage on her own for several years, I visited occasionally, maybe 2-4 times a year. Her biggest issue was managing her money, so I tried to simplify things for her, arranged for her bills to be paid automatically, etc. She was ok with taking care of herself, shopping, etc. She had some medical issues and eventually was not able to manage. I moved her up to a senior (independent) living facility 15 minutes from me. She lived on her own, had all meals provided, weekly housekeeping, activities, neighbors, etc. and I would visit probably weekly. Then she had a stroke and needed more help. I moved her to the assisted living side of her facility. She gets to go to the same activities she was going to before, same friends. She currently doesn't need a lot of help, mostly bathing so she's safe in the shower and medication management as she was becoming unreliable about taking her pills.

Thankfully my parents saved plenty of $ and there is no issue with paying for her care. I have talked to friends with aging parents and it sounds like if there is no $, medicaid will pay for assisted living if they qualify. Since I haven't had to do that, I don't have the details.

It is a whole lot easier to move parents into senior living when they can be part of the decision and are more mobile. As we get older, it gets more difficult for US to arrange all of this.

One more thing, great idea to think about possibly healthcare power of attorney, advanced directive, financial power of attorney if something should happen.

[–] chillpanzee@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 weeks ago

Proper estate planning (Trust, will, healthcare directive, etc.) are all important, but even with a good plan in place, there are a few not obvious things that were a surprise to me:

Banks will disable online access the moment they get a death certificate, and from there, the process is entirely opaque. If you have passwords and access, knowing account numbers and balances before you notify the bank of the death can be a big help.
Email accounts like gmail are often the center of people's business life, and having access to them can be a massive help. But Google will not help you get access to a decedent's accounts if you didn't set it up in advance. Even if you know the person's password or access codes, Google makes it very hard to access a person't account without their phone. They offer inactive account access to automatically grant access after a period of time. It's not great, but might still help.
There's a high probability they have accounts, insurance policies, benefits and liabilities you don't know about. This can be a chore to figure out in retrospect.

I don't think there's a perfect solution, but after going through this with my parents (who did have a trust, will, advanced directives, etc.), I decided to make a "What do do if die" document for my kids. It's a few pages long, details accounts, what stuff I own, what I still owe, and tells them how to get and use passwords and 2FA seeds. Maybe most important, it tells them who they can call for help for certain things. We also did a trial run. Made me realize that so much of life is tied to my phone for shitty 2FA and identity tracking. Once I realized the instructions were "If my phone dies with me, you can't do any of this" it made me try to find solutions that were secure, but not in the hands of big tech and telco companies.