My Mom was a wonderful woman. She was strong-willed, intelligent, and had a great business mind. Early in her life she owned an antique shop, buying and selling antique dolls and making thousands of dollars from each sale.

Yet, when she died, she was almost completely broke.

This is My Life

A bit of history first. I came from a lower-middle class family. My Dad held various jobs, mostly blue collar unskilled labor positions. My Mom managed the household finances and made sure everyone in the household was taken care of. We never went hungry and always had the clothes and things we needed.  There are times growing up that I still don’t know how we managed to keep afloat, but we did. My mom was a whiz with day-to-day finances. At the same time, she had absolutely NO concept of investments, retirement funding, IRA’s, mutual funds, or any number of fairly common financial items that most families take for granted today. She assumed that the government would take care of her when she got older, and that Social Security would provide whatever she needed.

If only that were true.

About 10 years ago, long after she had divorced, and long after I had entered and left the military and had gotten married myself, she started having financial problems. She didn’t have any income other than her Social Security, and her bills were steadily going up. She was lucky enough to qualify for an apartment in a retirement complex (not a rest home, as it didn’t supply any personal assistance) so her rent was low and steady. Her needs weren’t too great at that time. By that time, I had worked my way up in my career to a level where I could have had her move in with me without any problems.

She’d have none of it. She was independent, and that’s the way she wanted to stay! There was no way she could be talked into moving in with us. She was going to stay independent until the day she died. At the same time though, her medical expenses kept creeping up and up, and were costing her a larger percentage of her fixed income each month. We offered to help her pay for the medicine, but again, her pride intervened and we were flatly refused.

At least she allowed us to look into various social service programs for her. If you’ve never been unlucky enough to qualify for food stamps, Medicare/Medicaid, WIC, and other assistance programs, I sincerely hope that you never have to. But if you do qualify, DON’T HESITATE TO GET WHAT YOU’RE ENTITLED TO. My mother, it turned out, was eligible for a number of different aid programs. As she was nearly unable to get out and around, I was the one that went in her place to fill out all the forms, talk with all the social workers, and basically do everything I could to get her whatever aid and help she was qualified for. I’m immensely grateful to the social workers who helped me out, but at the same time, sitting for hours in the waiting areas was a desperately depressing experience. Surrounded by people that were down on their luck, and doing everything they could just to get by, it was a very sobering and humbling experience.

So, What Have We Learned?

I realized quite a few things during this period of my relationship with my mother. We had slowly started exchanging our roles as Parent and Child. I became the Parent, watching over my mother, the Child.

I also realized that when you have very little left in your life in the way of material items, you can still have your pride. My mother was a strong-willed and proud person. By the time I started taking up more and more of the duties of supporting her, that was pretty much all she had left. I took VERY special care to try to preserve that pride. She wouldn’t move in with me, because she though of it as losing her independence, so I did everything humanly possible to make sure she was able to remain independent, while still being taken care of.

I realized that even though our roles had changed, our love for each other was just as strong as ever. It’s that bond that helped her through the illnesses, the surgeries, and many of the bad times she had. She depended on me, and I was going to do whatever was necessary to take care of her.

My final realization is that discussing your parent’s finances with them is HARD. It’s a sensitive subject, particularly with someone who you look up to and admire. But you have to get past the admiration and down to reality to do anyone any good. We had a series of long, hard discussions about her finances. She finally started taking my advice (and consequently, some of my money) and once we broke the initial ice, things continued to get easier.

The one point that she was adamantly against was moving into a ‘real’ retirement home. A home with nurses and assisted living facilities and all the rest. She wanted to remain independent for as long as possible.

The Final Goodbye

My mother had been in and out of hospitals for years, but in 2000, she went into the hospital with a particularly bad case of what turned out to be a respiratory infection. Also by that time, she had deteriorated in health to the point where she clearly could no longer live by herself.

I had to make the hardest decision then. It was finally time to make arrangements for her to be moved to a retirement home. My wife and I got handfuls of brochures from the hospital, and visited a number of homes, hoping to find one that my mother would be happy in. We finally settled on one near another of my mother’s friends, with big rooms, nice nurses, and a beautiful garden in the back patio area.

My Mom passed away that evening.

Later on, after the sadness had subsided some, I realized that she had gotten her wish. She had stayed independent and proud all the way to the end. She had lived her life how she wanted to, and I had succeeded in helping her do that.

Things could have been different. I could have forced changes on her, like going into the retirement home earlier. It might have made a difference. But then again, it might not have.

I’ve never doubted my decision to help her live the life she wanted.