You can’t get too far into the “long distance caregiver” process without realizing that there isn’t much you can do long distance except talk on the telephone and send things through the mail. If you’re going to be a caregiver, at some point you and your elder are simply going to have to get closer together geographically. A stark question then presents itself: who’s going to move, you or your elder?
Increasingly, it seems, it’s the elder who moves. For many families this makes practical sense, but it doesn’t reduce the emotional complexity of the situation.
In my own case, the logistics were comparatively simple. My mother lived in the next town. She had been a widow for several years when it became clear that she could no longer live on her own. My wife and I and our then-teenage daughter sat down with her, and the four of us decided what we were going to do. Mom sold her little house, we sold our little house, and together we bought a house in our town big enough to hold three generations. That was traumatic enough, and it didn’t involve a serious relocation for anyone.
If we had lived in another part of the country, we might well have made the same decision, but Mom would have had to leave her church, her doctor, her friends and her other family members in order to live with us. The whole thing would have been far more complicated for us, and orders of magnitude more difficult and disorienting for her. But this is the situation that more and more families are facing.
USA Today recently ran a story that detailed the experiences of several families who have worked through this. Some take things in stride, and other have more trouble. Probably every family’s experience is unique in some ways, but I think the USA Today article does a pretty good job of tracing the major themes and variations.
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