We have said for years that there are only three kinds of people in the world. There are people who are caring for someone right now. There are people who are going to. And there are people who already have. That is the whole list. Most of us will stand in all three of those places before we are finished, and a good many of you are standing in one of them while you read this.
About one in four American adults is caring for someone right now, and the number keeps climbing. Nearly half of them say it has cost them financially. Those figures are accurate and they are also beside the point, because nobody has ever felt like a statistic while doing this.
I could give you the numbers and move on, and most letters would. I am not going to, because we have been on the inside of them. My mother and father both needed care before the end, at home first and then in assisted living. Jake’s mother’s parents both needed long-term care, one of them for years with Parkinson’s and everything that comes with it. Sherry cared for her mother and her father. In our case there was insurance involved and there was a great deal of cash out of pocket, which is the honest answer for most families. It is usually a combination, and it is usually more than anyone budgeted for.
But the money is not the part I think about first. My mother took care of my father for as long as she was able. We brought help into the house, and it was still not enough, and she wore herself down doing it. Understand that she wanted to. It was a labor of love and she would not have handed it to anyone. Then my father passed, and there should have been some time on the other side of that, a stretch where she got her own life back and found some joy in whatever she had left. Instead her health broke almost immediately, and then she was gone too. Some of that was age. Not all of it was age.
That is the part that does not show up in a spreadsheet. Caregiving is a brute. It is physical and mental and emotional all at once, it runs for years, and it compounds quietly the entire time.
If you are the spouse, it takes the years you were counting on. If you are the adult child, it can consume the middle of your life while you are also raising your own kids and holding a career together. Nobody signs up for it. Almost nobody refuses it either. It arrives, and you answer, and you find out afterward what it cost.
The question we ask
So when someone sits down across from us and tells us what they are carrying, there is a question we ask, and we ask it every time. Who is taking care of you?
That question did not come out of a brochure. It came out of watching my mother. It is the question nobody asks the caregiver, least of all the caregiver, and it is the one with the most riding on it. If you go down, you are no longer any use to the person depending on you, and now there are two people who need care instead of one. That is not a lecture about self-indulgence. It is arithmetic.
It also means the planning question is not really how to protect a pile of money. It is how to keep the person doing the caring from being destroyed by it. Those are different problems and they get different answers. Bringing in paid help earlier than feels necessary. Deciding in advance who does what among the siblings, in writing, before anyone is exhausted enough to fight about it. Knowing what the insurance actually covers and what it does not, so the first surprise is not at the worst possible moment. Getting the legal documents signed while there is still capacity to sign them. None of that is exotic. It is just far easier to arrange three years early than three days late.
There is one other thing, and it belongs in a letter about a family business. When we were caring for our parents, we used to tell Jake to pay attention, because this is what families do and his turn would come around eventually. It was half a joke. The other half was completely serious, and he knew it. He was old enough to watch all of it happen, and he did watch it. That is not a burden we put on him. It is the thing he inherited, the same as everything else. You take care of the people who took care of you, and you do not have to be asked twice.
We know this ground. We can navigate the financial side of it with you, and we can help you get the legal work coordinated and done. But the reason I wanted this in the letter is simpler than that. Wherever you are on that list of three, in it now, seeing it coming, or on the other side of it, you should know that the people across our conference table have stood there too, and we are not going to hand you a pamphlet and wish you well. Call us. And if it has not arrived yet, that is the better call to make, because nearly everything worth doing here has to be done in advance.
A note on what we left out
There is a great deal of technical ground underneath this: how the insurance products are actually structured, what the legal instruments do, what employers are required to offer and what they merely might.
We are building a proper long-term care reference library for that material rather than trying to compress it into three paragraphs here. If you want the detail before it is finished, ask and we will walk you through it directly.