Serious Content Alert! I had another conversation recently with a friend who is bordering on exhaustion, the example of the sandwich generation who, in this case, is caught between caring for an aging parent and grandchildren. Either role would be tiring, both together bring about a level of emotional and physical drain that is daunting. The irony, as is so often the case, is that the aging parent,  when having been through this with her own parents, had talked about how difficult it was and how she wouldn’t do this to her children. Except this is precisely what she is doing. There are a number of studies that capture this dynamic and what it comes down to is relatively simple. although emotionally complex when you are the one going it through it. It is why I chose, “This Isn’t Supposed To Happen To Me” as the title for Part I of, Your Room at the End: Thoughts About Aging We’d Rather Avoid. No matter how intelligent a person is, there is a strong tendency to believe that they will never become that querulous, demanding, confused individual who truly needs to be in assisted living. In your fifties, sixties, and seventies if you are fully functional, you just can’t imagine that your body and mind will betray you, even if you are coping with it as the caregiver and watching it happen to someone else.

The main points to Your Room are: 1) that you could be lucky, but there is no way to know how your latter years will be; 2) if you refuse to make plans and the worst happens, then what you have done is forced others to bear the burden that you didn’t intend to, and 3) you force others to make decisions for you. These are uncomfortable things to think about, and to plan for, and there is nothing that makes them easy. But, and here is the very big but, not planning doesn’t cause it to not happen. What I urge in the book, what I urge to everyone when I do presentations is this. Find out what resources are available, what resources you have, and make a plan for if the worse happens. Seek out what facilities or at home assistance is available, think through if you might have to relocate. Recognize that if you have more than one child, they may not be able/willing to share equal portions of caring for you. What to do if you don’t have children is too complicated to get into, but I do cover it in the book.

Most of all, be honest with yourself now, while you can, and it’s okay to hope you never have to deal with this. Maybe you won’t, but that’s not a good way to bet. Staying at home instead of going into assisted living is sometimes a better option (or sometimes the only option), and if so, build some relief for your caregiver into the plan. It will become important.