Talking about money...

One of the biggest mistakes I made was in not forcing my parents to talk about their finances. The clues were there but I chose to ignore them.  My parents had already, on several different occasions, asked my brother, Gary, and I for money.  Whenever we asked what they needed it for, they wouldn't tell us. "If you have to know what it's for, then forget it" they said, "We don't want the money."   We gave it to them anyway, hoping that whatever problems they had would somehow go away.  We didn't want to deal with it-my brother had a wife battling cancer and his work, and I was in production all the time while engaged in my bachelor social life...

While it's not abnormal for parents to continue the lifelong habit of shielding unpleasant or embarrassing information about themselves from their children, it is still severely counterproductive when parents withhold information from children trying to assist them in planning for old age.     Caring for aging parents takes a village-children, friends, relatives and professional caregivers- who all play a part in nurturing and protecting those who can no longer care for themselves. But it's really difficult when the people who need help don't want it, and who also happen to be your parents...

After my mother's death, my brother and I went over their accounts and discovered that they had been using one credit card to pay for another, using over 30 cards in all to keep themselves afloat.  It was a disaster-they were over $230,000 in debt and my father was forced to declare bankruptcy.  It was incredibly painful for him because, after a lifetime of working and making money, declaring bankruptcy represented an attack on his own sense of self-worth.  Sadly, none of it had to happen the way it ultimately unfolded...

Much of this occurred during a period when Gary and I weren't on speaking terms, and I think that if we had been talking, we might have helped each other to more clearly see the warning signs and avoid the tangled mess that emerged after my mother's passing.  Acting in concert would have made it much that much harder for my parents to hide anything...   

But there's only so much anyone, even the caring child, can do...

I often find myself writing about the mistakes that I've made. Some people have told me that it sounds negative to them, but I think that they are missing the point.  The fundamental truth is that if we can't be brutally honest with ourselves about our own mistakes, then how can we ever hope to improve on them?  Positive thinking is great, but honesty about our own behaviors, good, bad and indifferent, is even better...

Check out my website: http://www.jamielegon.com to see an excerpt from my book FEET FIRST-Riding the Elder Care Rollercoaster with My Father, follow my blogs, or to contact me directly...