By Leslie Price
Sometimes, it happens quickly. Other times, it’s drawn out. And even before it has happened, we know it is out there on the horizon, waiting for us. It’s the question of what to do about mom. Or about dad.
When it comes to aging parents, the challenges are vast. There are health issues, financial concerns, worries about them becoming victims to predatory scams. Depending on the situation, there might also be medications to manage, doctors’ appointments to attend, and endless paperwork. Now there’s a new podcast that talks honestly about all those sorts of things and more. It sounds like a bummer, but somehow it’s not – it’s refreshing, with surprisingly funny bits and lots of empathy.
“Look, I don’t know how this podcast will do because I don’t think people are going to want to listen unless they’re in this stage,” says Vanessa Grigoriadis of So Your Parents Are Old, which debuted this week. “But there are so many people who are in this stage that I’m hoping people want to commiserate about it.”
I spoke with Grigoriadis about why she decided to launch a podcast about caring for aging parents, what she’s learned from the project, and how to start these conversations with your parents (if you haven’t already).
This is such a big topic. What were you hoping to discuss?
I never saw coming – that I was going to have a nine year old and have to take care of my mother, who’s 83. I have to do it. So many of us have had our kids late. We’re not empty nesters with old parents.
When my dad passed away in 2017, I had just had my baby. Then, a few years later, my mom started having memory loss. As an only child, there’s nobody except for you. I don’t have any family closer than Chicago, so there’s no one else to take care of her.
I look at [my career at] New York Magazine and I’m like, I can’t believe I was once this person. It’s almost a fantasy of a life. I was running around and going to brunch and writing these stories that were quite frivolous, but I took my craft (and still take my writing) incredibly seriously. And now, I have no choice but to put my whole life into my family. I still work full time, by the way.
It’s like, are you fucking joking? There are so many things happening at all times. What form has to be filled out? What grab bar has to be ordered? Should I give away all these clothes that don’t fit my son anymore?
And if your parents were older parents and you are an older parent, it snowballs.
There are obviously upsides to having an only child as a parent, but as a person who was an only child, it does all rest on your shoulders.
I did a story for New York Magazine where I went and interviewed all these people who had only children. All the parents were like, how will it work when I’m old? And I was like, why are you even thinking about this? But now I see. Because it’s like I’m an orphan or something. I feel not good, psychologically. The way that siblings split up this nightmare of chronically ill older parents is [typically] one person does the finances and the other person does the care. But I have to do both.
Because of all the scammers, you can’t change anything on their bank account. It requires a million forms and POAs [Power of Attorneys]. Yet another thing none of us want to deal with: admin.
[Prior to this,] I didn’t make my life complicated. And taking over somebody’s life financially is complicated. I didn’t talk to my parents about all this stuff because I’m an idiot. I was uncomfortable. I didn’t know how. My dad was too sick, and then my mom couldn’t remember anything.
It’s been like a seven-year scavenger hunt. I don’t have their passwords. Parents don’t want to write down their passwords. You have to figure out some way to pull all the information out of them while they’re still alive.
Part of the appeal of this podcast is commiseration about the challenges, but did you also pick up any tips or helpful strategies?
The thing about forgiving the friends and family who disappear – forgiving them for yourself, not necessarily for them.
If you’re like, it seems like when I go to my mom’s house, it’s very dirty and she used to always clean – something’s happening. And if you ask your mom, is something happening? She’s probably going to say no. It’s up to you to take action at that point.
Give them socialization. You have to actually go visit much more than you want to. And everybody says this, and it’s way easier said than done, but … old people can be very annoying. You just have to understand, everybody becomes more who they are. If they’re hoarders, there is even more hoarding. If they’re anxious and neurotic, they’ll be even more anxious and neurotic. With memory loss, there are weird changes. Sometimes people are meaner, and that is not really who your parent is.
I haven’t found a support group. The Alzheimer’s Association runs an amazing hotline because we have no social services in this country, so you can call them. Basically every fatal, horrible disease has a hotline, and the people who staff the hotline are very nice and helpful. You might as well just call them.
Now I’m the go-to person for all the things that happen with everyone’s old parents. A friend’s dad had triple bypass surgery. Now he needs home care, but of course he doesn’t want it.
I was like, this is the moment. Take advantage of the crisis. The crisis is when the parent will have to accept home care which, by the way, you have to pay for.
Oh, yes. I want to talk about money. What have you learned about costs? What are people talking about? What are they encountering?
I mean, it’s total insanity. My parents didn’t get long-term care [insurance]. That could be because they were in denial about death, I’m not sure. But the long-term care coverage that was available for the baby boomers was quite good. We can’t get that anymore. Medicare will pay your $110,000 hospital bill, but they don’t consider long-term care at home to be a medical need. Maybe you can get physical therapy, occupational therapy, or speech therapy, but you can’t get somebody to take care of you. So you’ve got to private pay.
You have a lot of people who are languishing in Medicaid nursing homes, and that fucking sucks.
There’s interest on the part of the government to keep people at home, and if they want to do that, then they have to start paying the adult caregivers. I now produce two podcasts and my mother’s life, in addition to the two kids. I work on her behalf every day organizing, making sure all the bills are paid, [dealing with] doctors…it’s just endless.
The flip side of it is, if your parents have a lot of money, get ready to spend two to three million of that money on their care. There are a lot of upper class and upper middle-class adult children out there that are going to be very interested in exactly how much money their parents have, what this house is really worth, et cetera. They’re going to find that the inheritance they thought they had is not there.
There are obviously different phases of this and different stressors that come with. There’s the anticipation and fear. Then, there’s the in-between phase where things aren’t great, but they don’t want to accept any help or they don’t want the home aid in their house, or they don’t believe that they need to stop driving or whatever it is. And then there’s the acute phase where it’s like, well, we all can see that this is very bad and now I have to manage their life and all the things.
You’re spending a lot of money in that what they call the marginal decade, that last decade of life.
When you have a kid, they’re very cute. And that makes it easier. But also they’re small and they accept you as the person who is in charge (mostly). And with the parent, that’s not quite the case, right?
No. Nobody wants to let anybody do anything, and until they have no choice. It took me two years of my mom wandering around and getting lost in her neighborhood for somebody to be like, why don’t you put an Apple tracker in her bag? And $60 later, I knew where she was at all times.
My parents don’t think they’re old yet. And I keep saying, you guys are old. But how do you make them have the conversation?
There’s this thing called Five Wishes, which seems pretty doable and a nice, easy way of couching it.
Everybody just says, you have to do it. And I agree, you have to do it. There’s a lot of talk about therapeutic white lies. People, if they live far away, are trying to get somebody in their parents’ house just to see what’s going on and make sure everything’s okay. Like, so-and-so from church just wants to come by to say hi.
I tried with my mom. I was like, we have this babysitter. Can she come and help you do the grocery shopping? And it was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Then she fell and then it was like, okay, well now’s the time. But it would’ve been a hell of a lot easier if it was a couple years before and she hadn’t fallen and it wasn’t a crisis.
Has this experience forced you to prepare for your end of life? Are you doing things now that you wouldn’t have thought of?
I’m thinking about it. I do feel like I have to keep myself in a good state of mind and healthy because these people are relying on me.
My parents kept everything, which makes it very hard to find anything. And I think we threw away some important stuff because it was just too overwhelming. Stuff is a big thing. There are boxes of my little notebooks from New York Magazine from 1998, [for example].
It has been a real wake up call about the importance of family. You realize, in the end, family takes care of family.
It brings up a lot of wishful thinking. Somebody told me they put their mom at the Coterie, which is the fancy place in Hudson Yards, and every time he would talk to her, she would be like, I treated you feel well, and you still put me in a home. And he was like, this place is $35,000 a month. What are you talking about? But she was not able to live at home.
Either they say, never take out me out of this house or they say, put me in a home, I don’t want to bother you. Or just take me to Switzerland – and now, I guess, California – and kill me. But you don’t know if any of those things are what they really want, and nobody’s willing to have those conversations.