If you choose to stay in your family home, or even if you downsize and move to a smaller home, be sure you check out some key things with your family. If they reassure you and promise that they will be both present and available to help you when the time comes, then you are a most fortunate person. However, you do need to factor in the fact that families frequently become scattered as job and relationship demands require.
If you are tempted to skip this conversation, you may be thinking, I have a large family, and at least one or two children who might remain near the family home. Do you honestly want to count on a suppostion as a sure thing? And when thinking about your children being there to help you, you also need to consider the reality that people are living busier and busier lives, and visiting older relatives often becomes an obligation rather than a pleasure, especially if the older relative routinely needs help with all kinds of things.
If you are tempted to skip this conversation, you may be thinking, I have a large family, and at least one or two children who might remain near the family home. Do you honestly want to count on a suppostion as a sure thing? And when thinking about your children being there to help you, you also need to consider the reality that people are living busier and busier lives, and visiting older relatives often becomes an obligation rather than a pleasure, especially if the older relative routinely needs help with all kinds of things.
Here’s another fact you need to look at: Helping an older person with many of the tasks of daily life can become an almost full time occupation, even if the task is shared between at least a couple of people. Making sure the older person has proper nutrition, appropriate medical care and a well kept home is a demanding and taxing undertaking. However, those are only the basic care issues as an old-old person may also need bookkeeping help, and perhaps some financial aid, a decent social life and regular visits from those they care about. As you can easily see, all this takes a lot of time, energy and organization, to say nothing of self sacrifice on the part of the “helpers.”
So what about the idea of hiring someone to help you out if you stay in your own home? That sounds possible if you have a sizable amount of monthly income or plenty of savings. It is not cheap to have in-home help! Check out the average price per hour of hiring someone in your area who is bonded and insured and comes with references. It may well be more than you can afford. Also, do you actually want to spend most of your time with an individual caregiver as opposed to having a variety of people with which to interact? It is usual that relatives and friends will probably not be available to visit you nearly as often as you would wish.
Staying home all alone, or with only a hired caregiver, is not an optimum situation for most of us. There are other options and we need to discuss some of these which we will do in the next blogs.
Staying home all alone, or with only a hired caregiver, is not an optimum situation for most of us. There are other options and we need to discuss some of these which we will do in the next blogs.
