I’m in the process of writing up a care agreement for my mother’s future (short version: Mum gives me house now, I take care of everything the house equity would have provided). It’s a lot like drafting a pre-nup, except instead of dividing up a house you haven’t bought yet and deciding custody of children that haven’t been born it’s all “what happens if Mum gets dementia” or “what happens if I get sick and need support too” type issues. Combined with reading lots of sobering stories about what can go wrong in caregiving and these sorts of agreements it’s a bit confronting. I have just signed myself up for a fairly expensive trauma/illness insurance policy, which also has a sobering list of all sorts of terrible things that could befall me in the future.

The whole process has also made me realise something - our society’s approach to aging is horribly broken. So many of the problems that happen with elderly people relate to a combination of abhorrence of the idea of aging leading to people not wanting to think/talk about options and a devaluing of carers so the job often gets foisted on vulnerable people who are often ill equipped to do the job and often exploited horribly. Add in our reverence for individual choice to be respected (which means people can lose capacity to make good decisions and no one has the power to do anything about it - refer to “scams”)

Just the way we generally talk about aging is illustrative - “when I get that way, just take me out and shoot me” is often the extent of planning for the future we do, and is often used to shut down conversations trying to do anything more. One problem with that sort of concept is it treats “getting old” as a one-time event that just happens, as if everything is fine one day, and the next you reach a point where you become valueless. That concept prevents people from taking a gradual approach to winding down as they get older. It’s no wonder elderly people often fight the slightest loss of independence, we set things up as an all-or-nothing situation, like walking off a cliff instead of a gentle downhill stroll.

The other problem with that is that no one actually has the power to “just” do anything - whether that be stopping you driving, “putting” you in a home, or shooting you. The only option people have to make decisions for you is if they can have you declared incompetent, both reinforcing the walking off a cliff feeling for older people and putting their family in the impossible position of being expected to look after them (both by society and earlier promises) without actually allowing the family any legal right to actually do so.

With the agreement I’m working on I hope to set things up to allow for a more dignified and gradual withdrawal from responsibility for Mum, allowing her to pass over the responsibilities that are getting harder to manage without losing choices of how she wants to live and what she wants to do. Hopefully I will be able to set myself up to eventually do the same in future.