Male Caregivers
(CONTINUED FROM PAGE 62)
counseling, and other services for
more than 60,000 members of the
entertainment industry. Yet when
Scherer, a caregiving novice, faced a
life-and-death crisis with his mother,
he remained silent.
Six years ago she was 84 and in a
rehab hospital in Bethlehem, Pennsyl-
vania, as he tells it: “I flew from Cali-
fornia to see her. She refused to eat or
talk to me. She rejected a feeding tube.
She kept insisting, ‘Let me go.’”
As his mother’s sole caregiver,
Scherer felt isolated and helpless. “I
needed to tell someone ‘I don’t know
what to do. I’m lost,’” he says. Scherer
followed his mother’s wishes and did
not allow doctors to feed her through a
tube. Events quickly took their course,
but Scherer was haunted by regrets as
he learned more about caregiving. He
realized his mother might have been
suffering from a treatable depression.
“My mother chose to die,” he says,
“but she didn’t have to.”
Since his experience, Scherer has
devoted himself to improving support
and services for caregivers at MPTF.
Members and the parents they may
eventually provide care for can now
consult with a geriatrician while the
parents are healthy, long before they
become so frail or depressed that they
lose the will to live.
AFTER LOUIS COLBERT RESCUED
his mother from the nursing home,
his sisters once again took charge
of her care. But six months later his
exhausted sisters finally sent an SOS
e-mail to the rest of their siblings: “We
can’t do this anymore. We have to put
Mom in a nursing home.”
It was the worst-case scenario—and
it got the family’s attention. Louis
called a family meeting. The seven sib-
lings discussed what skills they could
offer and when. The beefiest brother
became his mother’s “elevator,” as
she called him, doing the heavy lifting
from bed to chair or car. Others offered
to take a night or (CONTINUED ON PAGE 84)
