As an adult child of an older parent in need of extra care, the stress of becoming a caregiver can be overwhelming. Oftentimes, large families with many siblings have to find ways to share the responsibility of caring for aging parents.
In a very interesting article by Lindsay Lyon as published by US News & World Report, Lyon’s discusses the growing transition of adult child to caregiver with longtime journalist and author Francine Russo. The following is an excerpt of the article.
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Francine Russo on Caring for Your Aging Parents
By Lindsay Lyon
Anyone with siblings whose parents are getting older should check out a new book by longtime journalist and author Francine Russo, They’re Your Parents, Too! How Siblings Can Survive Their Parents’ Aging Without Driving Each Other Crazy (Bantam, 2010). In it, she floods light on an underdiscussed, highly emotional life stage that can strain even the strongest of sibling bonds: what she calls the “twilight transition,” when brothers and sisters who long ago left the families in which they were raised—and in some cases haven’t spoken in years—are hurled back together as adults to grapple with their parents’ aging, illness, and death. “It’s the new life crisis of our original family,” she writes. And it can get ugly. U.S. News chatted with Russo, and here are edited excerpts:
Why did you write this book?
This is one of those intersections of the personal and the professional. While I was a journalist on the boomer beat, I was covering caregiving, aging—many boomer issues—and I also had a column [and] people wrote to me. Many had issues with their siblings. At the same time, my parents were aging, and my sister was in my hometown taking care of them. I was pretty clueless about what was expected of me. Nobody actually asked me to do anything, but tensions ran really high. We just kept doing what we had always done. I called on Sundays and went to visit every few months for an afternoon—that’s what I always did. At my mother’s funeral, I saw my father and my sister holding each other up and weeping. I was shattered. I was ashamed because I finally got it—what they’d been through without my help—and I began looking for answers as a journalist, interviewing experts and siblings. I really was interested in the psychology because I’m not really a bad person and I’m not usually psychologically clueless, and yet I got it all wrong. So I started looking for answers.
Why do you say that the “twilight transition” is new in our time?
The average person is living 30 years longer than in 1900—30 years! People used to die of heart attacks, they used to die of diabetes, they died of cancer, but there weren’t treatments that kept these people alive for 10 or 15 years with these ailments. Our parents are living for much longer times and longer with chronic illnesses, which means they need help. That’s new. That’s totally new.
If you look at the latest caregiving stats from the AARP, there are 43 million people taking care of a parent or elderly relative, and 91 percent of them say they do not share the responsibilities equally with anybody; 51 percent—more than half—say they do it alone. Now, you have got to figure at least 80 percent of those people have siblings, and there’s got to be a huge story in that.
Are most people prepared to deal with this period?
Nobody is really prepared to deal with it. We think of our parents as eternal. This stage of life, for everybody in the family, evokes very old and very deep feelings. Everybody is going to react and overreact based on things that are not about what’s going on right now. They’re not about whether Mom moves to this assisted living versus that assisted living. They’re really about old things. Without realizing it, we get caught up in sibling rivalry again. So we’re arguing about whether she should eat health food or go to the major cancer clinic. But the ferocity of the feelings we have comes from somewhere else. People [should] just remember one thing: that they’re not the only person losing their parent; [everyone] is going through it. Cut each other a little slack. Give each other the benefit of the doubt. Have a little compassion—even if somebody isn’t behaving well according to your standards.
What if siblings can’t seem to do that?
There’s a whole new field of professionals who can help: geriatric care managers. I’m a big fan of geriatric care managers. Their client is the old person, but they can help all the siblings communicate. For example, let’s say your brother lives in California and you’re in New York, and whatever you tell him about Mom he doesn’t believe because he doesn’t want to. Then he gets a call from the geriatric care manager, and she very factually lays out your mother’s condition. What’s going to come up in the future. What her needs are now, so your brother doesn’t have a chance to say, “Oh, that’s just my sister being hysterical or complaining.” The manager can also say, “Listen, this is too much work for one person. Let’s have a meeting or a conference call and talk about assigning responsibilities.” If siblings really can’t stand each other, they don’t even have to talk to each other. The person in the middle, the professional, can help coordinate. There are also social workers.
To read the entire article click here.
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