Anyone who is charged with the task of caring for an aging parent, particularly the only surviving aging parent, faces a tough decision at some time in the time of their caregiver years. And that decision is whether to have mom or dad move in with you.

When that idea first comes to mind, you can probably think of more negatives than positives. It really goes against your orientation since you moved out of your parent’s home as a youth. Since then your entire goal was to live separately from your parents, not to combine them again.

How long you consider this idea depends on your living situation as well. If you are unmarried, separated or divorced, you may have the space in your home. And in that situation, you could combine your homes and save considerable money. You would not have to feel bad using a little of your parent’s retirement or Social Security money to pay the rent since you would be saving them so much. And who knows? It might be nice to have the company.

If you have a spouse and children, however, the decision gets a little more complicated. If the fact that you are even considering letting grandma or grandpa move in with you leaks to the kids, they will probably be extremely enthusiastic about the idea. After all, they love their grandparents and having them live here seems so ideal. But children are not aware of the additional stress having Grandma move in might cause.

Additional positives about the idea of letting Grandma live in your home is that you would be there at all times to help with her medications or to jump to her aid in the event of a sudden medical problem. And worry about your parent weighs heavily on you as primary caregiver because the last thing you want is for something to happen to him or her and you were not there to help. Having mom or dad in your home would eliminate those many car trips to their condo, apartment or assisted living center as well. You could include the food preparation in with what you do for your family and in every way, they could just blend in.

But when considering the big question of “Where should Grandma live?” most experts in caring for the elderly advise heavily against letting them live with you if it can be in any way avoided. For one thing, parents will be parents. And Grandma or Grandpa would not be able to resist getting in the middle of child discipline situations or being nosey about marital spats or issues that come up with teenage children.

Teenagers are elusive enough as it is without having to answer questions from inquisitive grandparents that are around all the time. Within the context of your family, you already have some fairly sophisticated conflict resolution systems. And those work because everybody can read each others signals. Throwing Grandma into that mix would be a disaster.

But the biggest reason not to have your aging parent live with you despite some attractive benefits as we have discussed is that you, as your parent’s caregiver, need to be able to get away from them for a while. Caregiver burnout is a big problem when everything rests on you for the health and well being of your parent. So it’s good for you to be able to go home and just let it go for a while. If that sanctuary away from the stresses of being a caregiver can be preserved, it should be at all costs for the health of you, the caregiver, your family and even for the well being of your parent. After all, maybe Grandma needs to get away from you from time to time as well.

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Providing care for your adult parent during their retirement years can be a demanding job. And the job continues to become more demanding as your parent gets older and his or her health declines. You will have to make more and more difficult decisions as the end grows closer and many of them you will make without the consultation your elderly parent if his mental abilities have slipped away due to the affects of aging.

If the senior citizen you are caring for is dealing with a terminal illness that lingers, those demands will become virtually overwhelming. When the end is near like this, your need for assistance will become acute. This is no time to try to be stoic. Dealing with a dying senior citizen is something that is usually outside of the abilities of caregiver children.

If you see that time coming, now is the time to make arrangements for additional help. If funds are in his estate, you can arrange for in-home nursing care. These outstanding organizations can be with the senior citizen for as many hours as day as you need them to be and provide skilled medical care to minister to the demands of your parent’s terminal disease.

But once your doctor confirms that your parent is terminally ill, waste no time in getting hospice involved. This is a federally sponsored program that is part of Medicare and they are trained specifically in dealing with death and the dying with skilled care, equipment and medications that will cost your parent nothing and take a huge amount of stress off of you. Hospice has been a lifesaver for many a weary caregiver who is worn out from months or years of care giving and is incapable of dealing with the extra demands of the patient’s final months of life.

But there is an adjustment you as caregiver will have to make as the nursing care personnel and hospice begin to surround your parent more and more in preparation for his or her final days. You have been so intensely involved with every aspect of your parent’s needs. And you have done a good job of getting them this far. But now you have to step away and let these skilled professional caregivers provide the comfort and medical care that only they can give.

This may be difficult because your parent will still call for you to be nearby especially during these weeks. This is a time to bring in clergy, and to alert your siblings who may have to travel to be by mom’s bedside in her final days. While there will be tears, if they can be with her a little bit before the final moment comes, that is a closure for the family that is tremendously valuable. And it helps your aging parent to have her children close to her as she approaches her final transition to another life.

Hospice will help you go through the transition in your own mind and heart to accept that the passing is near. It will take some emotional courage to begin preparing for the funeral even though your parent is still with you. But this can also be a bittersweet time of sharing because if your parent accepts what is to come, she can have some say into what she wants to have happen at the funeral and about other final arrangements.

Perhaps the strangest transition that you alone as the primary caregiver will go through will happen in the days just after the passing. There is always a shock when your loved one dies even if it was very much anticipated. But you will go through another drastic set of emotions that can only be described as “separation anxiety”.

When you get that news that your parent has passed, you will suddenly feel the lifting of a burden that may have been on you for months or years. You no longer have to worry about your parent any more. You don’t have to go there, take care of her food or medicine and comfort her any more. The lifting of that pressure can be liberating and disorienting for you. You will feel strange throughout the funeral and the family times as well. But keep these feelings in your heart as well because they will be sensations that only you and others who have been primary caregivers will ever be able to understand.

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There comes a time in the adult lives of children and their parents when it dawns on you that you might have to step in and begin having a more active in your parent’s lives, not as a child but as a caregiver. For every family, that time seems to come as a shock.

It’s strange because we all see reports on television about the transition that we go through when the parent becomes the dependent one and the child becomes the boss in the relationship. And the hardest part of that transition may be the first time you have to step in and “stage an intervention” because there is an area of life that your parent needs to let go of and you know they won’t want to. So what are the signs that its time to step in and suggest or directly take action to make that change in your parents lives?

When it comes to driving, your dad or mom’s doctor will be able to help by determining if your parent is physically able to drive any more. When the senior citizen’s eyesight dims to where he or she cannot distinguish details in the distance or when depth perception is poor so he might not be able to judge where the intersection is or if he is stopped at the stoplight or in the middle of the intersection, the time is right for Grandpa to give up the keys and let someone else do the driving.

The time to start the process of moving mom or dad out of their own home and into an assisted living facility may be more tricky to determine. As with driving, the senior citizen will mount every effort to appear to be competent to continue to live independently. That ability to live on our own, go where we want when we want to and take care of our own needs is so fundamental to who we are and to our self esteem that this transition from living on their own to living where everything is done for them is emotionally difficult to be sure.

So you as family members and as the caregiver for your parent need to watch for the signs that your parent’s ability to take care of the house and of themselves living independently has come. Some of the symptoms of the need for change are…

§ How is your mom or dad’s health holding up? Are they eating well? Check the pantry and the refrigerator. Is it full of good things to eat, fresh foods and lots of supplies for cooking or is it sparse showing that going to the grocery store is a trial for your parent?
§ Are your parents taking care of themselves? When you come over, do they look like they are sleeping ok? Are they groomed and clean and are their clothes clean and ready to use or is everything wrinkled because its too hard to do the laundry and press shirts and blouses?
§ How does the house look? Is it in good repair? Is it picked up and the kitchen clean with everything put away? If mom was always meticulous about her kitchen and now it’s always a mess, she is having trouble keeping up with the housework.
§ Does mom or dad stay home all the time? If they were normally outgoing and always up for a car trip, an outing to church or even just the grocery store or even an adventure, becoming a homebody signals that they don’t want to go through the trouble of getting fixed up to go out.

Of all these symptoms, probably the one that signals the time to step in and take action is immediate is if your elderly parent falls or goes to the floor and then cannot get up. If your mom or dad has to pass the night on the living room floor because they could not get up and had to sleep there until someone showed up to help them, that’s an emergency situation that calls for immediate action.

Talk to your elderly parent about the risks of living alone, particularly in a scary thing like being unable to get up. By the time such a frightening incident happens, your parent may be suspecting the time to go somewhere that they can live with greater security and safety is here.

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The generation born between 1950 and 1970 has often been called The Baby Boomer Generation. There have been some variations on that title including The Me Generation, The Vietnam Generation and even for the sake of a certain comedian, The Al Frankin Generation. But the title that is most appropriate to where we are now, as we become caregivers for our children as well as our aging parents is “The Sandwich Generation”.

This is a painfully appropriate term because those of us in our late 40s to early 60s find ourselves with responsibilities to the two generations before and after us, both of which can be quite needy. The result is a fair amount of stress on us as moms and dads with all the demands that rising children, teenagers or maybe the children of our children can put on adults in this new century.

At the same time, caring for aging parents can be even more stressful and hard on
The Sandwich Generation from an emotional stress point of view. The stress we realize when our parents begin to age is a new thing for us. Making ourselves aware of the needs of newborn babies is not hard to get our arms around at all. When everybody in the generation is having babies, there is plenty of support and help for those who are learning the quirks of what babies need.

In addition to the great support and “parents training” classes and books, the arrival of a new baby in the house is a source of joy. There is great hope at the arrival of a new child and taking care of our children carries with it that creative element of doing something for the future. We see in our children our legacy so seeing them succeed and helping them overcome difficulty is exciting as we do all we can to “launch” the next generation of our family.

But caring for aging parents carries less support and far less optimism. While there is some joy in knowing that helping your parents live a happy and productive senior life keeps grandma and grandpa around for the children, the senior years are ones that will have only one outcome. And as much as we do what we can to make things easy and give our aging parents the comforts and joys of the golden years, all the sugar coating in the world wont cover up the fact that at some point the end will come and we, the Sandwich Generation will have to be there every step of the way to guide them through the end in the same way we guided our new children through babyhood.

The similarities between old age and infancy have been well documented. But it’s very hard on caregivers to go from being the ones these parents were always strong for who always took care of us to seeing that dynamic completely reverse. To see daddy who was always the smart one, the strong one and the one you could run to get weak and old and lose his mental sharpness is hard to watch. Now is the time when he has to turn to you.

It takes mature adults to be the sandwich generation. But we can take joy in knowing that, in a way, we are giving back to those strong parents who never spared any expense or time for us when we were growing up. Now when its you they need, they deserve no less devotion and dedication to doing all we can for them that they gave to us when we were youngsters.

Perhaps the hardest task you will ever be faced with is to help one of your parents cope with the loss of her spouse. Naturally, this is going to be a traumatic time for the whole family because as much as mom lost her husband and the father of her children, you have lost your daddy and you have grief yourself. So how do you help your mom and grandma to your kids get through this very difficult transition?

It will be a time when you will need the understanding and support of your spouse and kids as well. And just as the grief you are coping with in yourself and in your now widowed mother is difficult, you also have to be strong and brave for your children as well.

This is the purpose of the funeral because through the good words of the minister, those not as close to the family feel closure that this good life has gone on to his reward. If your dad was ill and going through a lot of discomfort, there is often a sense of relief that he is no longer suffering. And if the family is strong in a religious faith, that assurance of the afterlife is a source of comfort as well.

Only you will be able to gauge how much support or comfort your widowed mother needs in the days just after the passing. It’s important to remember that grief surfaces in strange ways. Many times the real deep grief does not surface at the funeral or even in the days just after as family stays around to be close and go through group processing of the loss of a loved one.

It’s when family goes home and the routine of daily life sets in that you should plan to be very accessible to your parent. That is when the emotions of grief will surface in the quiet and privacy of the home. It might be advisable in this kind of situation that you live with the grieving parent for period of a week or two to help with the transition.

Another thing about grief is that it is selfish. While we put a noble face on it and say we are grieving “for” the lost one, the truth is the grief is really for the one who remains because it is she who has to learn to go through life’s routines without that spouse. By being present during mealtime and those little moments of the day, you can “talk through” the different times when your widowed parent remembers that the dearly departed was part of this part of life.

There will be a lot of rebuilding during those first months of being alone. So you as caregiver can help that transition by not letting the times of loneliness be so long between visits. Obviously, your parent will eventually have to learn to get through the rituals of life alone. But be there for her so that transition is not so jarring.

But even if your parents was stoic at the funeral and only shows a happy face to the grandkids, there will come a time when she has to cry. Be there for her. Don’t try to come up with any “comforting words.” Just being present, maybe doing the dishes or pouring each of you a glass of wine can be the biggest comfort you can provide.

Finally talk about the dearly departed. Ministers know the value of talking about the fun, interesting and wonderful things about the dearly departed. It is a way of reminding ourselves that he didn’t really go away. The memory of him will be here forever in your hearts. So take some evenings and sit down with that box of family photos and go through them with the widowed parent and laugh about the different events of your family history when you were just a little squirt and mom and dad were young and good looking kids themselves.

The joy of these times will be tremendously healing for the grieving senior citizen and for you too. But by going through grief, healing, closure and moving on together, you bond with your parent and lay the groundwork for the important care giving challenges you and she will face together in the months and years to come. But you will face them and you will conquer them because you are going to do it together.

Being a caregiver for your aging mom or dad could be compared to a battle. This is even more so if you are caring for a loved one who is terminally ill. That is because the battle you are fighting will ultimately end in the passing of your loved one. But you are committed to their health, happiness and well being and to do all you can to make their golden years as peaceful and enjoyable if you can.

So what would you consider the greatest enemy you fight in this battle? It might be the battle to keep your parent’s medications up to date and to make sure she takes them every day without fail. It is a struggle to keep up with the prescriptions, the frequency of dosage and to make sure your elderly mom or dad stays on top of it too.

The greatest enemy you fight might be financial concerns with the rising cost of rent, food and medical care. Keeping your retired parent’s bills paid and anticipating if they can pay them next month and next year is source of constant worry for you as their caregiver.

But there is one enemy that is bigger than all of these. And the source of this enemy is not the economy or the retirement center or even in something going on with your parent at all. It is an enemy that seeks to hurt you and take you out of the picture. And that enemy is resentment.

Resentment can get into your mind and cause you to begin brooding about things before you even know its happening. But it’s an insidious enemy because if that resentment comes to full fruit, it will damage your willingness and ability to take care of your aging parent and seriously hurt your ability to be a caregiver at all. And if your loved one loses you as his or her primary caregiver, that is the worst loss they can endure because you are the one holding everything together for them.

Some of the resentment might be toward the systems that are supposed to help your parent. The Social Security and Medicare systems are constantly changing and becoming more complex each time some politician decides to use Social Security as a political tool. Resentment can also build up toward the facility where your parent is living if you feel your dad or mom are not getting the kind of care they need.

But the worst kinds of resentment are those you feel toward your siblings or toward the very aging parent that you are there to help. This is a serious problem because if you come to resent those you love the most, that resentment can go very deep and seriously hurt your ability to continue in the struggle to help your parent all you can. It’s easy to resent your siblings because you may have the job of primary caregiver just because you didn’t move far away. But the resentment you feel toward your aging parent is so easy to give in to because it comes from how needy they are and that often that senior citizen seems demanding and ungrateful for what you are trying to do.

So to beat resentment, you have to go back to why you are doing this in the first place. You are not doing it for your siblings and you are not even doing it for the senior himself to be honest about it. You are doing it because they took care of you when you were little and because it’s the right thing to do. And as long as you stay grounded to what is the real purpose of this mission, then you can fight this war and win it for yourself, for your parent and for everyone that loves him or her as well.

There is a balance between the jobs of a caregiver and the feelings of a caregiver. If you can detach yourself from the many emotions you feel when you have taken on this hard job, many of the “tasks” are fairly routine. Whether it’s doing your mom and dad’s laundry or grocery shopping or paying the bills or filling out the Medicare paperwork, much of the “stuff” of being a caregiver is pretty humdrum.

But just doing the chores of taking care of your aging parent’s physical needs is not all there is to being a caregiver. If that was all there was to it, you could hire someone to handle that. No, the real challenge of being a good caregiver for your elderly parent is the emotional support you give to them as they struggle with a tough part of their life.

This is particularly true if you are helping your mom or dad through the trials of a terminal illness. Even if they are good at putting up a brave front for the grandkids and the people at church, your mom or dad experience a gamut of feelings if the end of their lives is directly ahead due to that illness.

The caregiver’s emotions at helping your parent deal with this somber realization are tremendously complex. You have your personal emotions that are a preliminary form of grief. That is why at the funeral of a senior citizen who passed away from a lingering disease, the caregiver doesn’t seem to be grieving as much as others. The truth is, the caregiver gets most of her grieving out of the way while the senior is still here and they work together to cope with the decline and passing as best they can. So by the funeral, the caregiver is usually “all grieved out.”

But your emotions about how you feel about your loved one and about this job of taking care of mom or dad in their final months or years will have a direct effect on how you go about the job of taking care of your mom or dad and how you feel about that job as well. Probably the two emotions most commonly associated with taking care of an elderly person in decline are pity and compassion.

Pity is not really a good summary of the feelings you have about taking care of your elderly parent or parents. You don’t really “feel sorry for them” the same way you might feel toward a hurt puppy or a baby that cries. Pity is not an action emotion. The action emotion that doesn’t just look at the suffering or unhappiness of the parent and say, “that’s a shame” is compassion. Compassion sees a need in the elderly parent and doesn’t just feel bad about it. Compassion says, “There’s a need. What can I do about it?” Compassion is the genuine emotion of a caregiver.

Can you influence whether you will react with pity or compassion to your elderly parent? Yes and how you manage your emotions will be a big factor in how successful you are as a caregiver. There are three key tips you should keep in mind constantly to help you manage not only your emotions but how you react to problems that come up in your care giving. They are…

§ Focus on the one you are caring for, not on yourself. Focusing on yourself breeds self pity and resentment. Focusing on them builds bonding and affection for your mom or dad.
§ Focus on the solution to the problem, not its effects. A good doctor doesn’t cure symptoms, he cures the disease. Don’t dwell on how bad something is but on what can be done to eliminate the problem entirely.
§ Focus on creating joy and happiness, not grief and sadness. Look for the good in a day. Look for joyful moments, times when you and your elderly parent can laugh, enjoy a meal or a good movie and use this time for fellowship and being together. That is the real joy of being a caregiver and one only you will enjoy in its fullest.

If you use these three “marching orders” of being a caregiver, your emotions will get in line and you will function out of compassion and not pity. Then your emotions will become powerful aids in your goals to help your elderly parent.

Have you ever heard the phrase, “The 200 pound gorilla in the room”? It’s a phrase that refers to a topic that nobody talks about but it so dominates everybody’s thoughts. Everyone knows the gorilla is there but nobody gets anxious because, after all, you don’t want to upset the gorilla.

There is a 200 pound gorilla in the room in any time being spent with a senior citizen. It is a topic that is blatantly pertinent to anyone in their golden years but it is a topic that nobody talks about either because it’s too upsetting or nobody knows how to talk about it. But it is a topic that weighs on the mind of your senior citizen mom and dad virtually every day. The 200 pound gorilla in the room is death and the end of life issues that are ahead for every senior citizen at some point or another.

As the caregiver for your elderly mom or dad, you should be aware how heavily the topic we don’t talk about weighs on the minds of your parents. If you have lost one parent, the surviving spouse is even more aware of the issue. But there are good reasons to remove the stigma from talking about end of life issues with your elderly parent. That is because there are numerous end of life issues about which you must reach some decisions before that time actually comes along including

§ The condition of the Will.
§ Do not Resuscitate and other advance directive document decisions to give to end of life medical personnel.
§ A review of insurance and the location of other financial documents that you, the executor of the Will or the person who has power of attorney will resolve.
§ Any desires the senior citizen might have about funeral arrangements.

In order to be able to discuss the end of life and issues related to death, you will have to be at a point emotionally that you can deal with the topic yourself. Many of us bury our thoughts of death in a mental trick we play that seems like we think we will not have to go through this part of life. We do that perhaps because we prefer to think about life or because we are uncomfortable about discussion of the afterlife and religious ideas.

So to get ready to be able to be a good caregiver and counselor to your aging mom or dad, you should sit down and get some peace and resolution about the topic yourself. If that means confronting your religious anxieties, well, that is part of adulthood and those who are depending on you including your aging parents and your children may be looking to you for some answers in that area. It will take some courage but face those issues so you can be ready to help your parents face them too.

If you have a religious faith and your parents share that outlook, this is the time to review the afterlife assurances that come from your religious upbringing. By spending time with your mom or dad reviewing the doctrines of heaven and the comfort those religious texts brings, you can give them renewed hope and peace about the coming of death because they will know that passing from this life is not the end.

Don’t let the 200 pound gorilla stay in the room. Confront the issue of death with your aging parent or parents and do so with compassion and kindness. If you do, you will help your parent reach a place of peace and acceptance about what is going to happen that will benefit them for the whole of their golden years remaining on this earth.

The job of becoming the primary caregiver for your aging parent is universally recognized as one of the most difficult transitions we will go through. To start with, it’s hard to go through the reversal of parent and child. All your life, mom or dad were the strong ones. They were the ones you ran to for help and who were always there to tell you, “It’s ok. Everything will be all right.”

But now as your parent ages and you have to witness their demise mentally and physically, you realize that everything may not be all right especially if your parent is going through a slow decline of a terminal illness. When the only outcome of what you are dealing with in your parent’s life is death, that makes it tough to stay upbeat, creative and proactive about how to handle life’s daily challenges.

The task of caring for an elderly parent is overwhelming. You have concerns about their finances, their medications, the progress of their disease if they are battling something terminal, their mental state, their diet and their emotional state as well. It’s easy to begin to “hover” your senior citizen in an emotional attempt to block any more harm coming to him or her. This is a parenting instinct and one that your dad and mom probably won’t resist because they want to be cared for.

You feel the anxiety of your parent and the fears they face as the months and years ahead hold uncertain dangers and a certain outcome. So there is an instinct in caregivers to give 100% of your time, your energy and your resources to caring for that elderly loved one.

The problem is that you, the caregiver do have other obligations other than caring for your loved one. You may have a job, a family and your own health and upkeep to think about. So it’s a good idea for you the caregiver, the family of caregivers and event he one being cared for to keep your eyes open for caregiver burnout to help the one who is trying so hard to take care of Grandma or Grandpa to also take care of themselves a little bit so they will last a lot longer.

Underlying much of the intensity of effort many caregivers put out to help their aging or align parents is guilt. Guilt can be a powerful force that feeds on itself in an unhealthy way. The outcome is not only does the primary caregiver feel guilty that mom or dad are even having to go through age related illness, they feel guilty for any time they take for themselves or to care for their own needs or the needs of their family.

Caregiver burnout can result in decline in health in the caregiver and eventually may lead to changes in attitude about the task of care giving and in some cases a nervous breakdown. Symptoms include poor sleep and eating habits in the caregiver, a possible increase in drinking to help “settle the nerves” and an inability to think about anything else than what mom or dad needs.

If you see these symptoms in yourself or someone you know and care about who may be suffering from caregiver burnout, act fast to get them some help. They need to realize that taking care of themselves is part of the task of caring for their aging parents. It may even be a situation that calls for a talk with the caregiver along with the one being cared for. If that senior citizen can see that they need to encourage their caregiver to go be with family, get some rest, see a movie and forget the responsibilities of care giving for a while, that respite from the stress can do a world of good for that important person in their lives.

Sometimes when you and your elderly parent are partnering for their care, it seems like an “us against the world” situation. But since the senior citizen you are caring for has little fight left in them, it seems it’s up to you to make sure that your elderly mom or dad get all they have coming. Just because a person becomes a senior citizen, that doesn’t mean their fundamental rights go away. They deserve and should expect to be treated with respect and for those serving them to live up to expectations.

But just as it was before your parent became a senior citizen, a right must be claimed to be a right. So while there is no formal “Senior Citizens Bill of Rights”, there are laws on the books about how nursing homes must treat senior citizens. And even if your mom or dad is in an assisted care facility and not a nursing home, there are some basic expectations that were in that contract and that are fundamentally assumed that the facility will live up to. And its up to you as the caregiver to make sure they are living up to what is expected of them.

First of all, the facility your senior citizen lives at should be reliable to provide the basics of safety and cleanliness. Look at the evacuation plan for the facility in the event of a fire or another emergency that would mean getting your parent out of the building. Is it a plan that is clear and is it workable considering the entire facility is full of elderly people who may not move very quickly? And what about emergency power? In the event of an emergency where the power goes off early, is there emergency backup power to operate elevators and automatic doors so everyone can get out?

If the facility offers food service as part of their package of services and if there is a charge for that service, there is a basic expectation that there will be meals made available three times a day, that it will be healthy food and that your parent will never be denied service. It is also not out of line to expect that the food could be delivered to the senior citizens rooms if your parent is ill or injured. And your parent should be able to get some variety in their diet. If they are not doing a good job of making foods that your parents likes to eat, they shouldn’t be making that additional charge for food service.

As we mentioned earlier, your parent didn’t lose his or her rights as an individual when they move into an assisted care facility. If your parent is paying to use that apartment, they have a right to live as they please in there. Within certain constraints because they are in a community setting such as keeping noise down after bedtime and the like, your parent should be able to do what he or she wants to do in the privacy of their home without the interference from others in the community or from the staff of the complex. This includes receiving guests, allowing family or friends to sleep over, how the apartment is decorated and what kind of music your parent enjoys.

A right that really cannot be detailed but can be felt dramatically is your parent’s right to be treated with dignity, compassion and respect. This is an intangible but how the staff of the facility treat the resident’s means a lot to your parent when they see these people every day. Its not out of line to expect the staff and management of the facility to know your parents names and greet them warmly when they come down to eat or go to a social event.

If the staff of the facility have to work directly with your parent, it should be done respectfully and pleasantly. If your parent reports verbal or emotional abuse going on by the staff, that is cause for you to investigate it and hold that facility to accountability for that problem.

Remember the old saying that the squeaking wheel gets the oil. So if the facility needs to be reminded of their responsibilities, you be that squeaky wheel. Squeak loud and squeak often so your parent can live in a place where they enjoy their days and feel that this is a place they can genuinely call home.