Following the three deaths in a week, two of them people our age, I have been doing a lot of cogitating. These deaths coincided with a growing realisation that it was time to put plans into action for the next lot of money. In total the care of my mother so far has cost verging on £300,000. That is the £70,000 that was in the building society that enabled us to have a stop gap while I researched the possibilities for her care from Christmas 2012, when I first realised I wasn’t going to be able to look after her myself, until the time in the summer of 2013 when the doctor said she could no longer live alone. At the time the pronouncement was made, my mother was sitting in her underwear in a curtained off cubicle at the hospital, not very sure how to get dressed. So I already had a good idea what was coming and we had interviewed the agencies, made our choice, had the first few weekly visits and I’d had the first meetings with the financial advisor.
I was, you might say, scouting ahead of the game.
The arrangement has been that I was first attorney for my mother and, in case something happened to me the S&H was the second. The other arrangement was that we could borrow about half the value of the house, after which actuarial tables suggested the projected interest in 14 years would neatly wrap up the rest so we couldn’t borrow any more than that.
However, now the S&H has a full time job and is about to become a father he does not have the time to be my stand-in, a role that requires at least three full days every week and sometimes five or seven of there’s a problem. The further down the road we go the more five or seven day weeks there are. And there is only £50,000 possible borrowing left.
And then I looked at the lovely neighbour to my mother. She had spent the last three years going up and down the country looking after a mother, a mother-in-law and a brother, all terminally ill. The understanding being that it was handy she had just retired because she could be handy and her husband, who worked from home would be home at the end of each journey and when all the people she was caring for had died, he would retire and they would have a lovely time together. Which was a great plan until he suddenly sickened and a couple of months later, the week before last, died. Younger than me I think.
Then there was the friend nearby, younger than me, who popped into hospital with a touch of pneumonia and popped out again in a body bag and is currently on a mortuary slab somewhere so they can find out what went wrong.
Such things as the previous three paragraphs concentrate the mind wonderfully. I have been feeling ill for months because I hadn’t made the inevitable decision. On Sunday my mother assisted. After quite a long lucid phone call she finished, comfortably and very pompously with ‘Now remember what I say, I always tell you when I die you must take Benji along to the vet and despatch him.’ I finished the phone call and thought I was going to be physically sick. What I actually did, utterly distracted, was go and put protein remover in my eyes instead of contact lens fluid. My mother has told me every day for two and half years to kill the cat. At first I put up with it because she has no memory in theory. At the point where she is saying ‘you know what I always tell you’ then it is obvious she does know what she is saying and she has in fact said it at least seven hundred times.
So I emailed the financial advisor to see how much could be raised and how many more months it would cover and I decided to go and discuss care homes with my mother. There now has to be an alternative back-up to the S&H, whose responsibilities lie elsewhere and with the funds running out and if the OT and I had both dropped dead it would have to be a care home. Moreover, as my mother has a sister who will be 101 in November it has to be a care home with a long term view of matters. Fortunately my mother’s solicitor and her old friend who lives in the same town are both directors of a charity home which will keep long-term residents on for free if the money runs out. This is the place where my parents placed an older friend whose husband had died, 23 years ago. They then had the choice of all the care homes in the town, researched by my father who had chosen this one, so I knew it had the merit of his approval. My mother had visited her friend there every week for about six months until the friend had died, so she is actually familiar with the home. Moreover, I knew going into a home where she had two friends who were directors might have some appeal to my mother who would enjoy reporting any recalcitrant nurses to her friend the director. Most of all I knew, because both friend directors had told me, that if something happened to me, all the funds had run out, and my mother reached 100, she’d be doing it in the same place and the S&H would be able to get on with his life and my mother wouldn’t be abandoned because the directors have to visit the home they are directors of.
So all I had to do was go and tell her.
Words are a bit of a bugger sometimes aren’t they?
Especially when you are explaining the cost of care to a person who had to stop receiving the care bills or the bank statements because she took leave of her senses and ran around screaming every time she saw the figures.
Well I did it, justified purely on financial considerations. I explained carefully and she understood, I assured her I only wanted her consent to investigate the possibilities and that nothing would happen for some time, once I got the further borrowing we would have enough money to take us well into next spring. She asserted, as she has been doing for some time, that she is not long for this world and we discussed the fact that you can’t ignore the fact that she has a hundred year old sister with whom she shares genes. She said she was shocked at the cost of care and we discussed the fact that she knew all this about the money but had forgotten and I reminded her that the awful care home up the road that we’d visited at her insistence had only cost three and a bit thousand less a month than the stay-at-home agency. I also suggested that her sister-in-law in a care home for five years had run out of money from the sale of her house and had been kept there financially by her son for a few of the years in my opinion, which she’d already worked out for herself.
So we had lunch and I went and did the shopping and we had tea and stayed till well into the evening to make sure she was OK.
This morning she sounded OK, I reminded her of the news, she was fine.
Absolutely fine up to the point where the agency rang to say she was refusing the next carer, wouldn’t have people in the house and so on.
I don’t for a moment think she will be around in the spring and neither does she but that hasn’t stopped her reacting very badly to the news that she will not be able to stay in her home with staff forever. Apart from the carer she was hating this afternoon (and the sixteen she has refused historically, an agency record, I believe) the carers have been wonderful and she loves them all.
It’s Joni Mitchells’ Big Yellow Taxi, isn’t it? Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?
I’ve had a headache all day, the S&H is quite poorly and my mother is playing as up as she knows.
But deep inside, I know this is the right decision. I have to make watertight arrangements for the care of my mother in case the OT and I drop dead. Tomorrow I’ll contact the care home and directors and find out how much and what the availability of the places would be next spring and on short notice if something happened to me and the OT. Then I’ll get the FA to get going on the further borrowing. And I’ll keep going with all the meetings, costs and paperwork of this, even though it’s a month to Miniatura, until it is all in place, hoping against hope that none of it will be needed.
A friend who lost her husband early doors when her children were still small described his illness, a brain tumour, as being like going along a long corridor with all the escape doors to either side slamming as you passed.
In the end is one door and you have to let your person go through it. But there’s nothing to stop you having a scout on ahead, even if the side door you peek round turns out to be the broom cupboard.
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Difficult times.