AARP The Magazine - March/April 2010

::::::::::::: Caregiving :::::::::::::

Love Is (Not) All You Need
To provide for loved ones who need long-term care, too many
older Americans are resorting to extreme measures.
It doesn’t have to be this way By MARY A. FISCHER

In 2004 Roberta H. and her husband, Alex, both 64, were living a contented life in a small town in western Massachusetts. Married for 39 years, with two grown sons, they had saved for years and were looking forward to traveling in a year or so, once they retired from their respective jobs—Alex was a college English professor, and Roberta was director of communications for a consortium of local colleges.

Then disaster struck. Alex was diagnosed with early-stage dementia and took early retirement from his job. Determined to care for her husband at home, Roberta paid various people—at a cost of about $1,000 a month—to take him for walks, drive him to the Y, and prepare his lunch. She filled in the gaps by phoning him several times a day.

As his dementia worsened, though, Alex needed full-time care, so Roberta found an adult-daycare center that could care for him while she worked. For 18 months Roberta dropped off Alex in the mornings and picked him up after work, a routine that went well until he had a medical emergency and landed in the hospital. Medicare paid for Alex’s stay, but after three days the hospital released him, even though he could barely walk.

“It was such a
stressful time,”
says Roberta. “I
had no time to
figure out where
Alex should go to
get the therapy
he needed.”
After a flurry of
phone calls, she
found a skilled

“I felt terribly guilty about getting a divorce, but I felt I had no choice.”

nursing home that didn’t have a waiting list, but there was a big catch: Medicare would cover only a total of 100 days of skilled care and rehab. When the coverage ended, Roberta began drawing on the couple’s savings, paying the nursing home