Hard-Won Advice in Books on Aging and Elder Care
Ms. Gross’s raw honesty about her feelings about all of this — often fair
and sometimes not, by her own admission — makes this book mandatory reading for any man with a sister who wants to be thoughtful about planning for aging parents.
There is no sugarcoating the number of physical and emotional challenges
that come with aging, so it’s clear why Ms. Veney’s upbeat memoir of the years she has spent caring for her mother, Doris Woodward, who has dementia, is so appealing.
The author, a former New York Times reporter whom I’ve never met save for a few encounters on social media, is unafraid to admit all the mistakes she made out of sheer ignorance
and how often even the most high-functioning adult children simply do not know what they do not know.
Once you’ve got a fracture there, there’s a 40 percent chance you’ll end up in a nursing home and a 20 percent chance you’ll never walk again.
But a smaller number of people wrote in unprompted to assign me homework — books
that they found useful as they were navigating their own changing conditions or those of spouses, close friends or other family members.
Already, the majority of Americans need Medicaid to pay for at least some of
their nursing home costs or care at home because they’ve run out of money.
The book explains the financial side of her mother’s care — including her eventual qualification for Medicaid — plain as day.
Women often lose out twice or more in the aging derby, first when they take on disproportionate responsibility for their aging parents
and then again when they outlive their spouses in old age.
