I am a daughter whose mother needed long-term care.
While I've spent decades in the LTCI industry, it's one thing to have intellectual knowledge about long-term care, and it's another challenge entirely to be the one responsible for ensuring your parent receives the best care possible. It was a huge reality check.
Thank goodness Mom had long-term care insurance. During the last eight years of her life, she had four nursing home stays and extensive periods of home care.
She bought her policy in 1990, and every year when the bill arrived, she'd call to ask if she should pay it. My answer was always the same: yes. She'd complain, but she agreed.
All Mom wanted was to stay at home. Her policy made that possible by paying for her care. We never had to liquidate any assets, and I could focus on supervising her care rather than providing hands-on care myself. This was especially crucial since she lived 1,000 miles away until the last year of her life, when at age 98, she finally agreed to move near me.
Even after Mom moved into independent living in a CCRC (a continuing care retirement community), we had a home health care aide see her every morning for four hours to help with bathing and other personal assistance. When she was age 99, we celebrated with a gala birthday party at the facility.
Fifty people joined us, including both her new friends and my longtime friends who knew her from her visits.
The party's theme was "Make new friends, and keep the old. Some are silver, and the others are gold." That should be familiar to any former Girl Scouts; we even used boxes of Girl Scout cookies as centerpieces.
