The Belle of the Brawl*

This is a totally political post.  While it began in the Clinton years, it was Newt who had power.  The current admin leaves society issues to the family unless it's to keep some people alive.  Well it takes a village.  And our society is aging but we have no social policies in place.  So most families do the best they can do. 

I got a Masters in Social Work with a concentration in clinical geriatrics while this was happening in the naive belief that the problems of the middle class, non Medicaid eligible would be addressed.  You have to be very rich or poor to get decent help in this country.  And if you have any assets and you're older with family you love, get a trust.  I took the link from the government.  They recommend it.

While I would love to take credit for the title; it's the name of Moxie and my friend, Sar's new blog.

This is the most personal post I have ever written. It's also the saddest; it's about things that I have been trying to talk about for fourteen years.

Yes Bring it on! is a political blog. But politics should primarily be about issues. Here it is aging, single adult daughters, taxes, health insurance, Medicare and Medicaid in one post.

My dad died suddenly when I had been working at Social Security for two months. I took three days off and on the fourth day the managers asked which of two offices I would want to work in. Frankly they both were in horrible neighborhoods, in places I wasn't too familiar with.

I was in the first External, not promoted from within SSI Claims Rep training class in eight years. Have always found it ironic that Bush 1 tried to put back together what Reagen tried to dismantle. I had applied for positions in San Diego and Miami, and the transfers came through. I had been in a semi-relationship with a character actor who had moved to LA; he had many male straight friends; it was perfect.

But my mom had macular degeneration. She was of the first generation of people to outlive their body parts through diet, good health care, and all the rest.

My mom's macular had begun when my parents were in a photo safari in Kenya; she thought it was her new eyeglasses. Maybe something could have been done then. We'll never know. Ultimately she lost all her eyesight except for a shadow here; a shadow there. She wasn't demented and yet many people treated her as if she were.

New York was falling apart in 1991; we were still feeling the effects of the 10/17/87 stock market fall and ensuing recession. I lived in the richest zip code in America, 10021, and would count the Old English Ale bottles I passed on the way to the subway. In the morning I would wake up bag people sleeping in both the vestibule and the first floor hall. There were three apartments on the first floor; the first was unoccupied; the second was mine; the third was occupied by girls my super thought were prostitutes; and I thought were drug dealers because people would come and go every five minutes at night. When I had overnight guests they would stay up and count; I had become impervious to it.

Oh I was so ready for a change. I made it all the way to Riverdale, The Bronx. If there is one place that I will never write nicely about it's Riverdale; my time there was hell.

I don't drive; the world's safer that way. It would take me about three hours to get to her house on Long Island. Keeping my mother independent took two daughters, a major part of my sanity, and almost my sister's and my relationship.

Estate planners often use a lifetime trust in place of a will. Like a will, a lifetime trust can be used to provide for the disposition of assets and has the advantage of avoiding probate. An advantage that a lifetime trust has over a will is that it also can be used to manage assets during a person's lifetime. For example a lifetime trust can be a useful planning tool for incapacity because it can be established and controlled by a competent person and later continue in operation under a successor trustee if the person establishing the trust becomes unable to manage his or her affairs.

My sister paid her bills and managed her portfolio; I took care of her doctor's appointments and what I later would learn were "psycho social" needs. My mom didn't want to have a trust though my dad was a CPA and my mom knew very well that she could control it. Since she couldn't do her own paperwork the only control left to her was not having a trust. I knew I should have urged her to do it, but she was my mom. My sister and I jointly consulted our mother on all financial decisions.

I had the brilliant idea to leave Social Security and get a Masters in Social Work with a concentration in clinical geriatrics. I took a year off to try out school and be even more available for my mother. I had left home at eighteen; 20 years later, there I was again. I didn't go out every day or even every week, but I spoke to my mom, five times a day. And whenever she would need me I would be there. I became expert at speaking to doctors and forcing them to speak to my mother. I became expert in old age, but I wasn't.

My parents had raised my sister and I to be independent. It was easier for my sister; she married, and several years later bought my mother's house when my mom moved to a large apartment complex that was a NORC; Naturally Occurring Retirement Community. It has an eighteen hole golf course, a country club, an arcade which looks like a movie set of a beautiful city, and activity rooms. My mom loved book clubs, discussions, museums, anything cultural really.

She wasn't very good at being dependent. She wasn't very good at becoming blind in her 70's and 80's

She was good at meeting people; but my always sociable mother became shy and insecure. She thought that most people treated her as if she were demented and as her own sisters refused to visit, I would have to agree with her. I no longer really speak to most of my mom's family. We had once been very close.

Newt Gingrich was elected shortly after I began school. For all of you who think it was a good thing; I'm not going to get into "changing welfare as we knew it." It affected my life incredibly.

I expected to be able to discuss these things at school but my top rated grad school of social work, didn't have one Masters Degree level course on aging from 94-96; they had before and after. I could have taken a PHD level course but was advised against the courses as I already knew the content from my field placement and research classes. The larger school had a center on aging but it was distinct from the social work school which made no sense at all. I did an Independent Study on Abuse because I had become good at recognizing it. And sometimes I wasn't sure if I was becoming an abusive daughter or not. Elder abuse can be hard to recognize; it's not only physical but neglect, fraud and other things. It's not mandated reporting.

My mom couldn't go to activities by herself as she couldn't navigate the hallway to the elevator and the arcade. She wanted me to fix this problem and I couldn't unless I moved in with her, brought her down and back up. Many other daughters might have done this. I couldn't.

I couldn't fix any of my mother's problems. Though I passed the state licensing exam while still in school, had been given my own hall in the nursing home I did my field placement in at the beginning of my second year, had a 3.84 cum, and an outstanding field placement evaluation, I felt like a failure.

My mom had been my best friend since I was a kid. I know that sounds strange, but we had a closeness and a friendship that's more typical in this generation of parents and children. I was slowly losing both my mom and my best friend. Oh yeah, I was adopted, for the record. I forget.

I stayed at the nursing home, though I had been offered some great field placements because it was familiar and I couldn't handle change that year. It was exciting the second year; I worked with two psychiatrists, both female, who had started geriatric mental health clinics. By the time I graduated the clinics had disbanded; victims of the Newt cuts.

Social work salaries were the only salaries to go down in 1996. When I found myself almost fighting for a $28,000 year a job I knew it was time to get real. It was a damn insult. If I didn't find a coop in Manhattan by the summer of 1997, I was going to be priced out of the market. I'm good at trends; it was kind of obvious to me. If I didn't find a coop in Manhattan I was going to lose my mind. Worked at the nursing home; went home to another or a building that felt like one.

I will spare you the rest. I bought a coop; my mom consented to get an aide five days a week, four hours a day. She wasn't Medicaid eligible; something I could have made her in a day, and I heard a lot about how stupid I was for not making her go on Medicaid as earlier I had heard about how I shouldn't have let her eat by herself. These were PHD's in Social Work who provided such incredible solace. They were experts in capability; they knew that the reasonable man standard no longer applied. A person could be capable in one area but not another, yet judged well enough to live alone.

My mom remembered every phone number; she could take five medications a day by herself. She was bright but blind and scared. Something happened to her after 9/11. It took the life out of her; she sounded different; at times I thought she had suddenly become demented. But two weeks after it, she said that there was a question she could only ask me:

"Do you think it's repercussion for everything we have done?"

I was shocked as I was in full patriotic mode. Fortunately I could speak in my normal voice and say:

"Some people think so. I don't."

She told me that sometimes she couldn't find her way around her apartment. I was the only person who knew this and I did nothing. May G-d or whoever forgive me. I knew that my mom wanted to die in her apartment and I knew that something wasn't right.

She fell in her bathroom and died fifteen minutes later. It is only this year that I have begun to lose the guilt and the extreme mourning. I'm me again for the first time in a decade.

But her death was only the beginning. Though we wouldn't have had to pay estate taxes this year, we had to pay full taxes for 2001. We live in New York City and thus had to pay city and state taxes. The highest.

This isn't going to make me real popular. My sister and I had never asked our mother for a cent. She would give me a hundred dollars many times when I saw her, but I would put out money for things for her and never asked for it back. My sister did the equivalent of a full time bookkeeper/accountant; I was my mom's private fully trained and accredited social worker. Even when I was working or in school. Both my sister and I stopped going far away. Neither of us would be more than three hours or so away from home.

I spent so much time at doctors offices with my mom, I neglected my own visits; I neglected many things because my entire psychic energy was tied up with my mom's. I don't know how else to explain it. I'm paying for all that now.

I am glad that my mom never went on Medicaid. I met so many people who were so much richer on Medicaid. I can understand it, but I don't think it's ethical or good. Yet damn, the Medigap was so complicated. Now sometimes I'm glad my mom's dead just so we don't have to look at the new insurance policies.

If my mom had a trust we wouldn't have given the government a huge chunk of money. Yes there would have still been the costs of probate, but...our mother didn't pay us. I didn't get any social security credits for the time I wasn't officially working or in school though I ran a hall and took the place of a part time social worker. My sister didn't get any during the ten year period. We deserved the money that went to the government.

No CPA, broker or lawyer could believe that she didn't have a trust. She was our mother; it was her wish to retain control if only in name. I feel badly about the money; I really believe that we earned it. But first we were daughters.

I can't believe that it took The New York Times until last Friday to discover this growing problem. I hope that people begin discussing it now.

I read in a blog today that The Times article could stop girls from becoming brain surgeons. Not at all; no 22 year old is going to stop a career because of something that could possibly happen when she's 50--I was adopted so my parents were older and my sister and I were younger. No, I was going through a mid career change, and my sister had just begun to work for my dad as she had an MBA.

I had a friend who finally moved out of her parents home when she was 38, a Senior VP at a Fortune 100 company, bought her own home, and her mother became severely demented and had to move in with her.

My mom and I would joke about my living with her. We figured that we would last two days before we began to want to kill each other. We wanted to anyway. Yet my mom remained my idol. It's so hard to explain, and at each aging symposium I would go to, I would expect to discuss similar situations to mine. But everybody either had pat solutions or no solution at all.

For fourteen years I have been trying to get a dialogue going on the problems of aging in America, very specifically the aging parent issue. Next very selfishly I want a dialogue on "who is going to be there for me", because while I was immersed in my mom's life I stopped my life. I looked like I had a life, but I was going through the motions.

I had never known what it was like to be depressed before. I know now. I knew how to be an independent adult; I didn't know how to be whatever this was.

The Times calls it "The daughter track," I call it the train to nowhere