quote:

Who Will Care for ‘Kinless’ Seniors?

Nearly one million Americans have no immediate family members to provide assistance if needed. The number is expected to grow.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/1...ly-living-alone.html

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I am one.

I have no children. I have two nephews with whom I have had no contact for more than a decade. I have two brothers who are older than I am and they have their own lives.

I have a step-daughter, but I don't expect her to look after me in my dotage.

So, my wife and I will be taking care of each other as long as we can.

Wish us luck.

I have lots of descendants, but I don't want to be a burden to them in my old age.

The uncertainty over how long one will live and how much one's care will cost (which is essentially equal to infinity, given our health care system that is designed to such up all one's money on the way out and too bad if that happens before you die) causes me a lot of stress and heartache.

In October I learned that one of the nieces I expected to give a power of attorney and more to is a virulent homophobe.
Time for a rewrite.
One nephew, the child of my other deceased sibling lives in a Denver suburb. I like him. Thinking of taking him to lunch Saturday.

Mr. Pique is enjoying his first day of partial retirement today. As a prelude to this life passage (he will by 75 in 2023), we hired a financial planner to help us make sure we will be able to manage these issues. In the wake of meeting with him, I am looking at the next step--revising our wills, our durable power of attorney, and our health care directive.

As Mr Pique is 8 years older than me, I can expect to have at least a decade of living alone as a widow. Both our families have members who lived well into their 90s and were active even into their early 100s, so we cannot count on having friends and family around to handle things. Therefore, I am actively looking now at our options, and thinking the best time to move is within the next five years, if that is what we are going to do. Our current living setup will not work if one of us is disabled.

If anyone else here is mulling over these same issues, I found lots of good recommendations and resources in the comments. A few highlights:

Visit with an estate attorney and/or elder care attorney
Talk to your local Council on Aging to find out what resources are in your community
Visit the website NavigatingSolo.com
Sell rare first editions and jewelry and high dollar antiques while you are still capable
Have an advanced directive
Move now to your final independently owned home--affordable, one floor, in a community of both young and old people. I think a university town is ideal.
Get a paid medical fiduciary
Get a paid financial fiduciary
Hire an executor

I'm going to be looking at which communities have the best social safety net for seniors, without putting myself into an elder ghetto.

And for all the planning, some of it doesn’t work if you develop dementia. My in-laws moved to a single level condo when FIL couldn’t do stairs any more. He passed away, and Mom has dementia. She can’t live there. She’s in assisted living, incapable, and doesn’t even know that the condo has been sold. Sad.

Too bad kathyk isn't around. This is her wheelhouse.

We have a couple elderly that we have rather adopted over the years. Hoping for good karma, but we can only do so much. Still, they have someone they can call.

Like Mary Anna, I don't want to have to place our burdens on our one daughter, who I know will do all she can. But that may be limited by geography. I have extensive experience from my mother's long illness in my twenties and dread putting that on her.

We should be set up pretty well provided we don't have to be institutionalized. If only one of us is it should still be manageable, depending on duration.

Good thinking, pique!

quote:

We should be set up pretty well provided we don't have to be institutionalized. If only one of us is it should still be manageable, depending on duration.

This. Our CFP says the worst case scenario is both partners need memory care or have strokes or have other issues that require 24-hour care. Then your finances are wiped out.

I would rather take a short walk over a cliff than live the horrors of a long, lingering, disabled decline that puts an inordinate burden on my partner.

Amen. I would hope I had the will and ability to end it myself rather than decimate her life when mine is essentially hopeless.

quote:

Originally posted by QuirtEvans:
Too bad kathyk isn't around. This is her wheelhouse.

The calling Kathyk signal has been sent.

Jf

With three kids and a younger wife (who worked caring for elderly in their homes), I don’t fit the profile in the article, but I do not want to be a burden to anyone.


https://youtu.be/4gO7uemm6Yo


The issue looming for me is my house. Three story Victorian with a yard full of gardens I created. I still manage and oversee maintenance, cut grass, rake leaves, clean up snow after the driveway is plowed. There are some 55+ communities in Maine that tempt me, but letting go of this house won’t be easy and may never happen.

Jf

This editorial was in NYT the other day, the person is very much anti-euthanasia. I don't have an opinion just yet, but I don't think he does a good job supporting his stance.

Nevertheless, it seems relevant given the direction this thread is going.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/1...archResultPosition=2

What Euthanasia Has Done to Canada
Dec. 3, 2022

By Ross Douthat

La Maison Simons, commonly known as Simons, is a prominent Canadian fashion retailer. In late October it released a three-minute film: a moody, watery, mystical tribute. Its subject was the suicide of a 37-year-old British Columbia woman, Jennyfer Hatch, who was approved for what Canadian law calls medical assistance in dying, amid suffering associated with Ehlers Danlos syndrome, a group of disorders that affect the body’s connective tissues.

In an interview quoted in Canada’s National Post, the chief merchant of Simons stated that the film was “obviously not a commercial campaign.” Instead it was a signifier of a public-spirited desire to “build the communities that we want to live in tomorrow, and leave to our children.”

For those communities and children, the video’s message is clear: They should believe in the holiness of euthanasia.

In recent years, Canada has established some of the world’s most permissive euthanasia laws, allowing adults to seek either physician-assisted suicide or direct euthanasia for many different forms of serious suffering, not just terminal disease. In 2021, over 10,000 people ended their lives this way, just over 3 percent of all deaths in Canada. A further expansion, allowing euthanasia for mental-health conditions, will go into effect in March 2023; permitting euthanasia for “mature” minors is also being considered.

In the era of populism there is a lively debate about when a democracy ceases to be liberal. But the advance of euthanasia presents a different question: What if a society remains liberal but ceases to be civilized?

The rules of civilization necessarily include gray areas. It is not barbaric for the law to acknowledge hard choices in end-of-life care, about when to withdraw life support or how aggressively to manage agonizing pain.

It is barbaric, however, to establish a bureaucratic system that offers death as a reliable treatment for suffering and enlists the healing profession in delivering this “cure.” And while there may be worse evils ahead, this isn’t a slippery slope argument: When 10,000 people are availing themselves of your euthanasia system every year, you have already entered the dystopia.

Indeed, according to a lengthy report by Maria Cheng of The Associated Press, the Canadian system shows exactly the corrosive features that critics of assisted suicide anticipated, from health care workers allegedly suggesting euthanasia to their patients to sick people seeking a quietus for reasons linked to financial stress.

In these issues you can see the dark ways euthanasia interacts with other late-modern problems — the isolation imposed by family breakdown, the spread of chronic illness and depression, the pressure on aging, low-birthrate societies to cut their health care costs.
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But the evil isn’t just in these interactions; it’s there in the foundation. The idea that human rights encompass a right to self-destruction, the conceit that people in a state of terrible suffering and vulnerability are really “free” to make a choice that ends all choices, the idea that a healing profession should include death in its battery of treatments — these are inherently destructive ideas. Left unchecked, they will forge a cruel brave new world, a dehumanizing final chapter for the liberal story.

For anyone on the right opposed to Donald Trump and the foulness around him (most recently at his Mar-a-Lago dinner table), the last six years have forced hard questions about when it makes sense to identify with conservatism, to care about its direction and survival.

One answer turns on which dystopian future you fear most. Among those NeverTrumpers who have left the right entirely, the overwhelming fear is of an authoritarian or fascist future, a right-wing threat to democracy requiring all possible resistance.

But in the Canadian experience you can see what America might look like with real right-wing power broken and a tamed conservatism offering minimal resistance to social liberalism. And the dystopian danger there seems not just more immediate than any right-authoritarian scenario, but also harder to resist — because its features are congruent with so many other trends, its path smoothed by so many powerful institutions.

Yes, there are liberals, Canadian and American, who can see what’s wrong with euthanasia. Yes, the most explicit cheerleading for quietus can still inspire backlash: Twitter reactions to the Simons video have been harsh, and it’s vanished from the company’s website.

But without a potent conservatism, the cultural balance tilts too much against these doubts. And the further de-Christianization proceeds, the stronger the impulse to go where the Simons video already went — to rationalize the new order with implicit reassurances that it’s what some higher power wants.

It’s often treated as a defense of euthanasia that the most intense objections come from biblical religion. But spiritual arguments never really disappear, and the liberal order in a dystopian twilight will still be infused by some kind of religious faith.

So I remain a conservative, unhappily but determinedly, because only conservatism seems to offer a stubborn obstacle to that dystopia — and I would rather not discover the full nature of its faith.

That opinion piece seems long on conclusions and short on analysis to me.

In particular, I'm not sure I agree with the central assumption ... that allowing people a choice to end their lives is somehow dehumanizing.

I do understand that it can take you to other bad places. For example, because the option to end life exists, society stops focusing on treatment and cures.

But the answer cannot be that, to avoid those evils, we will force people to remain alive with unbearable pain.