The Care Company

empowered caregiving™

 Consider this: more than 60 million Americans are caring for a loved one, providing unpaid care and services worth more than $450 billion a year. Read that again and let it sink in, because chances are good that one day you will join the ranks of those 60 million.

You may not want to be a caregiver – most people don’t, for it is possibly the most difficult family responsibility you will ever take on. It will affect every aspect of your life – your career, your freedom, your relationships, everything. On the other hand, if you plan for it and think about it and take some necessary steps, you can handle it in stride, overcome the challenges with grace, and experience the ride of your life without living in crisis.

We are a nation of planners. We carefully plan and consider everything – our marriages, where we live, when we have children, where they will attend school and go to college. Heck, we carefully plan which animals to bring into our lives. We plan and plan and plan. Yet, while diligently planning our lives, we tend to avoid planning for them to end.

You and every other person who reads this has parents or relatives who are getting older and will one day need care, if they don’t already. That’s’ pretty straightforward. And yet, if you’re like most people, contemplating caregiving can feel like standing on a cliff high above a tiny pool of dark water and knowing you have to get down there somehow. You don’t know how deep the water is or if you can even hit the target. You’re sure you’ll either drown or go splat. You don’t dive because of fear. You’re on the cliff, you need to get down, but you are frozen by fear! What you need is an alternative route to the bottom. You need a path rather than a plunge, something to give you some control over the descent. What you need is a plan – a good, strong, well-considered, integrated, comprehensive plan. And then you need to follow it. You make calls. You write lists and check off items day by day. And in this way, you take control and turn the headlong plunge into a much gentler decline.

To do this job, however, you will need help – personal support  from someone who can teach  you what to do. Welcome to The Care Company. We are your Support Team!

Getting Started

We can hear you saying, “OK, great, I need a plan, but how do I come up with one? How do I do this? Where do I start?”

You start with a conversation. Talk with your loved one or parent(s) about eldercare before something happens. It is best to do this when your loved ones are healthy and vital. Schedule a time to have dinner or coffee together and simply explain that when the time comes, you want to be prepared. Say something like, “Mom, you raised me to be responsible, and so I want to discuss how you would like to live your life when you get older and need some assistance.” You might meet resistance, but that’s perfectly OK and to be expected. Stay the course until you figure out a way to get the conversation moving in the right direction. To start, it only needs to get moving. It may take more than one attempt on your part, but no matter what your loved one says, stick with. Your effort to lay the groundwork now will pay great dividends in the future, and giving up or walking away will only create more anxiety for everyone. Be patient, but be persistent.

If your loved one resists having the conversation, it may be because, as a society, we’re not particularly comfortable thinking about our own mortality. That may be because it’s the ultimate vulnerability, the end of the game in a hyper-competitive culture. Help your loved one to engage by telling her that you want to have all the systems and procedures in place and that this would be the best gift that s/he could ever give you because you love your parent and her cooperation will enable you to do the right thing and handle everything just as she wants you to.