Lucy remembers her first exposure to hard conversations with senior parents. Seven years ago Lucy and her husband, who were in their 50s, left their home and jobs in Chicago and moved to Maine. Not to retire or experience a slower pace of life, but to care for Lucy’s elderly mother.
“At first she was still quite independent,” says Lucy. “She was driving, swimming at the local pool every morning, buying her own groceries, and cooking her own meals. She also had a social life that made me tired just to look at it!”
Unfortunately, soon after they moved in, she began to decline physically and mentally. She was still driving and Lucy was terrified that she would hurt someone. Here with the first of their hard conversations with senior parents, and they had some of their most difficult conversations about the issue. “For a person who has spent all her life HELPING other people, to have the last thing you do on this Earth be that you killed someone because of your irresponsible driving — someone else’s mother or father or a young child — it would be awful. She would get angry and say. ‘Well, you just don’t understand. You don’t know what it’s like when you can’t drive anymore. Your life is over.”
They would go round and round and not get anywhere.
hard conversations with senior parents: where to start
Any conversation you have with an elderly parent is bound to be difficult if it involves losing independence. “Most of the time people want to remain as independent as they can for as long as they can and usually their children want them to as well, but they don’t always agree on when help is needed,” contends Ellen Jackson, a geriatric social worker at Maine Medical Center’s Outpatient Geriatric Center. She suggests starting those difficult conversations along these lines: “I know this isn’t an easy subject for you or for me, but there are some things we need to talk about. We are concerned about your safety, but we also want you to have a good quality of life and be happy and independent. Can we talk about ways to accomplish that?”
Lucy accomplished it by promising her mother she would find a safe and convenient way for her to get around. She couldn’t be the full-time driver because she had a job, so she found someone else through their church. “For almost a year she would show up every Thursday,” describes Lucy, “and eventually Mom started to have so much fun that it began to be about having fun, not about being dependent on someone else because she couldn’t drive.”
Adjusting to change
When the driver moved out of state, Lucy hired someone else through a local home care agency, similar to Advantage Home Care. “As time went on Mom needed more and more help,” Lucy says. “With each staff person we added it took a few weeks to run smoothly, but we learned that the transition time would pass and the new people would soon become old friends.”
Ellen says as hard as change is, not only for the elderly person but also the entire family, everyone usually adjusts. Trouble is, people worry about it and keep putting off talking about it, whether it’s about driving or living alone when it’s no longer safe. The bottom line is your parent’s safety, she emphasizes. “It’s all about safety versus quality of life, and trying to determine the acceptable risk.”
Offering choices
If the risk for your parent is no longer acceptable, Ellen recommends that you offer choices — even when you know the person probably won’t like any of them. “For instance,” she suggests, “if somebody wants to stay at home and you want them to have services and they don’t want to do that, I might say, you know you need some help because of these specific reasons, would you rather have help in the home or would you rather go into assisted living?”
Even when someone has dementia, you can offer choices, but always keep it simple, she advises. “Don’t overwhelm them with choices. Narrow them down.”
Gaining some peace of mind
And while you may have initiated a difficult conversation because you care about your parent’s well being and happiness, Ellen says it doesn’t hurt to say it’s also because you want some peace of mind.
In one of their difficult conversations, that’s what motivated Lucy’s mother to agree to some extra help. “I said look Mom, I know YOU don’t need someone to do this, but I need someone to do this. It’s for ME. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘if it makes YOU feel better, let’s try it.”
Do you have any tips to share about having a difficult conversation with your elderly parent? Please tell us in the comments section below.
This post on hard conversations with senior parents was republished from the Advantage Home Care blog. Thanks!
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