My Eldercare Experience
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By Charles Osaki |
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By Mark Baumohl |
| Publication Date: Spring 2007 | |
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Both Mark Baumohl and Charles Osaki recently lost both of their parents and dealt with the myriad of eldercare issues leading up to their parents’passing and the initial administration of their estates. The following article is a follow-up to one that appeared in the Winter 2006 issue of The Bottom Line, entitled “Elder Care Planning.” With Mark’s assistance, Charles documents his actual eldercare experience to stress the importance of planning for the inevitable.
My mother was 87 years old, in poor health and entering a phase that would lead up to the end of her life. And I was the person “chosen” to care for her needs, since she could no longer care for herself. I’ve received years of training and experience in a variety of areas, from financial reporting to marketing to human resources. But when I was recently confronted with the need to make decisions about my aging mother, I was surprised to learn how unprepared I was and how difficult the process can be. Eldercare planning? I jumped right into the eldercare experience!
My crash course in eldercare began when my brother called about our mother. She was getting forgetful and wasn’t eating well. Worse yet, she fell and fractured her arm in two places, and was resisting getting needed help. I had always considered her to be a “strong” woman in every facet, and she had managed well on her own since my father died in 1999. But her mental acuity was slipping, which I wasn’t prepared for. What is a perfectly natural process opened a Pandora’s Box for my family. Little did I know, my role would evolve from being a son, to a caregiver, to a personal business manager (of sorts), not to mention a mediator in dealing with my two older brothers, in-laws and my mother’s friends.
After her fall, my mother not only needed someone to help care for her, she needed someone to make crucial financial decisions on her behalf. Thus began my experience with the concept of Medical and Durable Power of Attorney (POA). Without having POA, I couldn’t give my mother the help she needed. Doctors and other healthcare providers won’t talk to you without a Medical POA in your possession. The reality was clear: no Medical POA, no help. The Medical POA is the ticket to making decisions when you are the one assigned as being “in-charge” of the loved ones who can’t care for themselves.
My parents lived through the Depression and lost much of what they owned during World War II. After the war, they recovered and managed to accumulate assets, but they were determined that no one was going to take what was theirs again. So as carefully as they managed their personal finances, they were equally secretive about the details. Not even my brothers and I knew what they had or what they planned to do with it. While we, as a family, should have talked about 1) our resources, in case of incapacity, 2) home care versus a retirement home, and 3) documentation such as the POA, wills and trusts, and who would be assigned which role, we never got around to it. Of course, my parents feared what many do: losing control of their resources and assets that were once taken away and deciding who is in charge of the estate and who inherits what.
We didn’t even know where the paper trail started. We uncovered it by looking through file cabinets and talking to some of my mother’s friends. I learned that my parents had the same estate attorney for 30 years! When I contacted him and proved who I was, I found out something else – my parents had signed a Durable and Medical POA. And they had decided to give the authority to make decisions on their behalf to their youngest child – me.
That would prove to be a problem for one of my older siblings. Thus, I was introduced to another facet of eldercare – jealousies and rivalries that can easily arise among children and other beneficiaries, which can make the tough decisions all the more difficult. Because that same sibling resides out of the area, he overcompensated and wanted to have some input into every decision. Understanding my mom’s wishes for home care and determining what type and extent of care to give was made several times more difficult by a brother who second-guessed me at each turn. The amount of stress was incredible because of the accountability (and sometimes guilt) I felt in each little decision. Ah, did I mention the resentment I felt too?
The first decisions we had to deal with concerned healthcare and appropriate housing. I soon became an expert on the world of senior condos, convalescent homes, retirement homes, assisted living homes and home care. The range of options was bewildering and surprisingly expensive. Equally dismaying was the realization that some options weren’t immediately available due to long waiting lists – up to three years!
With advice from doctors, colleagues at work and friends, we settled on round-the-clock home care. We selected a provider after interviewing three and addressing an array of issues that come with contracting for such a service, from licensing to workers compensation to monitoring the care actually given. My first achievement was complete – I found home care that my mom agreed to! But, could she (we) afford it?
Next came a succession of financial decisions. I asked my mother for tax returns for the last two years, to measure her cashflow and other resources to pay for home care on an extended basis. How would I handle paying for all of my mom’s healthcare and other expenses she might incur? I needed a bank account to draw from for her care, so we went to the bank to add me as a joint tenant to her personal account. In doing so, she had the bank take one of my siblings off and added my name, which created some ill-will because technically, I would have sole custody of the account when she passed away. The key point is that it was my mom’s choice and I had to be able to pay bills and have the freedom to make sound financial decisions, now and in the future.This is where the Durable POA is important – in order to speak with bank representatives and other financial institutions, you have to have a Durable POA; otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to make any financial decisions for my mother. Before I got the Durable POA from my mother’s estate attorney, no one, not even banks and advisors we had relationships with for 50 years, would answer my questions.
I also learned that my parents had set up a living trust and a will. Because they did this, we would avoid probate fees and retain some privacy and time spent on probate proceedings. Through their trust agreement, they had transferred title (“funding the trust”) of all real estate, stocks and bonds, valuable artifacts, and other property into the trust so there would only be one bank account left outside the trust. For good measure, my mom executed an assignment of personal property into the living trust, which provided a “sweep” of all other tangible personal property (i.e. heirlooms, jewelry, paintings, statues, etc.) into the trust that may not have been considered by the original trust document. In the process of understanding that action, I got to know about estate taxes, exemption trusts to minimize estate taxes, conservatorship, pour-over clauses, assignments and many other issues.
My parents had named my oldest brother the executor of the will. But again, they had put the youngest in the family (me) in charge of the trust, which held 95 percent of the assets. That heightened the distrust and resentment that had emerged in my relationship with my brothers, particularly the one who lives out of town and held a strong interest in how I was managing the affairs.
While the real estate was the most valuable asset, it was the personal heirlooms that caused the biggest headaches, mainly because my father was a prominent silver & goldsmith. Where were the heirlooms? What was their value? Who would inherit them? It would have been much easier if my mother had decided which artifact goes to which son. But she hadn’t done that, never anticipating that there would be a fight over family heirlooms. But neither did I. We did find their location, but they were in a safe deposit box at a bank in which one brother had an account that was held in joint tenancy with my mom. My brother conveniently could not find a key to the safe deposit box when my mom was alive and I had Durable POA (only valid when mom was alive) and he wasn’t in a sharing mood with the other brother who was executor of the will after her death. Hence, I was not able to account for all of the heirlooms held in my mom’s safe deposit box. The point of this is that two of us wanted the jewelry in the safe deposit box for keepsakes and our other sibling did not. My intent was to have my mother choose which pieces of my father’s handmade jewelry would go to each of the three to us, but this had to be done while she was alive. Since my mother’s will was silent on this (each child is to receive equal amounts), we are faced with having to sell the jewelry to allocate equal shares in their worth, a result I had hoped to avoid at all cost.
As my mother entered the final stages of her life, we had to learn about other issues, starting with hospice care and, eventually, funeral and burial arrangements. My mother had purchased a plot next to my father with specific instructions. This made the decision-making easier, and an advance meeting with the mortuary to go over details saved me a lot of emotional anguish later.
I also went to my mother’s church and met with the minister, apprising her of our situation. And I had met with an events coordinator at the church ahead of time to learn what needed to be done and when, once my mother passed. Because of those planning steps, my family was able to finalize all of the funeral and burial arrangements within a day.
Knowing where to get the death certificates and how many were needed was extremely beneficial. Because I had retained an estate attorney for the trust, I knew how to implement the trust agreement, what was in the trust, and the nature of my responsibilities as sole trustee.
Three steps that I took in the process of helping my mother were particularly helpful. Planning my schedule around handling my mother’s healthcare and financial affairs enabled me to weave it into my work schedule, which allowed me to handle everything without taking much time off. Instead, I set aside several hours a day to attend to these issues. Tracking down her paper trail enabled me to understand her financial affairs and make the best possible health care decisions for her. And because I contacted her best friends, some of whom lived in other states, many of them came to visit her during her last several days of life. After this experience, I strongly recommend making an effort to have copies of the Medical and Durable POA in your safe deposit box before the one you’re suppose to care for becomes incapacitated.
One thing we didn’t do in our family was communicate with each other in advance. That was not our strong suit. But this experience built a much greater bond between my oldest brother and myself through simply communicating with one another throughout this shared experience and by showing one another mutual respect. Unfortunately, my other brother has cut off all communication while one conflict remains – the contents of that safe deposit box. If we had previously held a family meeting between the surviving parent and the siblings about assets and the parents’ intentions for them, as well as various other decisions that would have to be made, we could have eliminated half of the stress, saved an equal amount of time, and possibly avoided such a strain on family relations.
In a perfect world, I would have gotten a head start in learning about the myriad of issues I had to deal with in planning for the aging and death of my mother, but the world isn’t perfect. That would be perhaps the most important recommendation that I would offer to others. Don’t be afraid to talk to people, especially those who have personally grappled with the issues related to eldercare. And make sure that while your parents are alive – and for yourself, while you are still alive – you put your affairs in order. This way you will surely do the best you can for a loved one. I think I did.
