Helping Your Aging Parent: A Step-by-Step Guide -- Revised

Most of us have no idea when to step in and help an aging parent – especially if they’re independent and living on their own. When should you get involved? How can you protect your parent’s assets, access needed help, and provide emotional support?

Here are the tools you’ll need to steer through one of life’s most challenging and rewarding experiences: caring for an aging parent.

In this revised edition based on journalist William Grote’s experience with his aging mother, you’ll find a step-by-step guide through the caregiving stages from the first discussions through needed action. Plus Grote’s narrative humor and easy-to-understand style lends simplicity to this serious and sometimes difficult subject.

Includes a toolbox of little-known tips to help you become your aging parent’s advocate:

• The 12 tell-tale signs that your parent needs your help.
• Proven clinical techniques for forgiving your parent so you can move forward.
• Common health problems in old age – which ones are serious and may be overlooked?
• Nine things you should always bring with your parent to a new doctor’s visit.
• Sure-fire methods to get other family members to commit their help.
• Often overlooked FREE community services.
• Legal necessities for even small estates (it’s easy).
• Two, low-cost alternatives to hiring a lawyer for a trust.
• Four often-overlooked alternative housing options.
• Three important ways you can ensure your parent’s safety in the hospital
• How to get your parent VIP attention from the hospital staff.
• The single most important thing to ask a nurse to check.
• Why you need to select a nursing home before your parent needs one.
• Tips on your own support with your parent’s dementia.
• Master conversation when dementia diminishes communication.
• Easily access affordable dementia care.
• Find a good hospice with 14 essential questions to ask.
• Open your heart for emotional closure.
• The 12 loose ends you must deal with after your parent dies.
• Six practical tips for planning a funeral or celebration of life service.

Learn from a journalist who dealt firsthand with the often-encountered problems. His “from the trenches” experience and research provide a candid resource of what works and what doesn’t when it comes to helping your aging parent. Facts, fill-in forms, checklists, and references simplify the process. His humorous real-life anecdotes lend levity and humility to this serious topic.

William J. Grote has a degree in journalism and spent over 35 years in the publishing industry, specializing in technical manuals and helping guides. As editor of an architectural magazine, his job included writing technical articles and news releases.He was introduced into the field of aging when his once-independent 78-year-old mother began exhibiting signs of dementia. He learned "on the job" the sometimes-overwhelming complexities and emotional rollercoaster of dealing with every aspect of the process, from doctor visits, the understandable resistance of a person clinging to independence, the medical issues, finding appropriate housing - to the inevitable end. He wrote the first edition of "Helping Your Aging Parent" soon after, in 2002. Now, with the clarity of hindsight and with a newfound levity only the passage of time will allow, in this revised edition he provides a lighter, warmer, more personal look while retaining all the detailed facts, choices, and guidance you'll find essential if you take this challenging but greatly rewarding journey.Now retired, Mr. Grote spends his time writing, but also making wine each year with grapes from his own micro-vineyard in San Diego, and tending his garden of rare fruit trees.