Caring for Our Parents

Chapter One

The Phone Call

Ann was out with friends on the evening of February 21, 1996. I was sitting in my favorite chair, reading a book and listening to music, when the phone rang. I don’t remember the book or the music, but I will never forget the call. With just a few words, my family was sent plummeting into a painful, mysterious, and all consuming world for which we were completely unprepared.

 

A five- minute conversation turned an ordinary suburban couple into caregivers for an elderly parent— a role we would play without respite for the next year and a half. Within twenty- four hours, we would begin careening from crisis to crisis, grasping for solutions to problems we only half understood, all the while being undermined by a medical and financial system that was as woefully unprepared to manage long- term care as we were.

 

It would be, at once, the most difficult and the most rewarding thing I have done in my life.

 

... read full excerpt from: Caring for Our Parents ebook