It was a memorable place to have an “aha” moment about aging.
Peter
Sperry had taken his 82-year-old father, who’d had a stroke and used a
wheelchair, to Disney World. Just after they’d made their way through
the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, nature called. Sperry took his father
to the bathroom where, with difficulty, he changed the older man’s
diaper.
“It came to me then: There isn’t going
to be anyone to do this for me when I’m his age, and I needed to plan
ahead,” said Sperry, now 61, recalling the experience several years ago.
Sperry never married, has no children and lives alone.
Like
other “elder orphans” (older people without a spouse or children on
whom they can depend) and “solo agers” (older adults without children,
living alone), he’s expecting to move through later life without the
safety net of a spouse, a son or a daughter who will step up to provide
practical, physical and emotional support over time.
About 22 percent of older adults in the United
States fall into this category or are at risk of doing so in the future,
according to a 2016 study.
“This
is an often overlooked, poorly understood group that needs more
attention from the medical community,” said Maria Torroella Carney, the
study’s lead author and chief of geriatric and palliative medicine at
Northwell Health in New York. It’s also an especially vulnerable group,
according to a recently released survey of 500 people who belong to the Elder Orphan Facebook Group, with 8,500 members.
Notably,
70 percent of survey respondents said they hadn’t identified a
caregiver who would help if they became ill or disabled, while 35
percent said they didn’t have “friends or family to help them cope with
life’s challenges.”
“What strikes me is how many
of these elder orphans are woefully unprepared for aging,” said Carney,
who reviewed the survey at my request.
Financial insecurity and health concerns are common
among the survey respondents: a non-random sample consisting mostly of
women in their 60s and 70s, most of them divorced or widowed and
college-educated.
One-quarter of the group said
they feared losing their housing; 23 percent reported not having enough
money to meet basic needs at least once over the past year; 31 percent
said they weren’t secure about their financial future. Some 40 percent
of people admitted to depression; 37 percent to anxiety. More than half
(52 percent) confessed to being lonely.
Carol
Marak, 67, who runs the Facebook group, understands members’
insecurities better than ever since suffering an accident several weeks
ago. She cut her finger badly on a meat grinder while making chicken
salad for dinner guests. Divorced and childless, Marak lives alone in an
apartment tower in Dallas. She walked down the hall and asked neighbors
— a married couple — to take her to the emergency room.
“I freaked out — and this wasn’t even that big of a
deal,” Marak said. “Imagine people like me who break a hip and have a
long period of disability and recovery. What are they supposed to do?”
Sperry has thought a lot about who could be his caregiver down that road in a circumstance like that. No one fits the bill.
“It’s
not like I don’t have family or friends: It’s just that the people who
you can count on have to be specific types of family and friends,” he
said. “Your sister or brother, they may be willing to help but not able
to if they’re old themselves. Your nieces and nephews, they may be able,
but they probably are not going to be willing.”
The
solution Sperry thinks might work: moving to a continuing care
retirement community with different levels of care when he begins to
become less independent. That’s an expensive proposition — entry fees
range from about $100,000 to $400,000 and monthly fees from about $2,000
to $4,000. Sperry, a longtime government employee, can afford it, but
many people aging alone cannot.
Planning for challenges that can arise with
advancing age is essential for people who go it alone, advised Sara Zeff
Geber, a retirement coach and author of “Essential Retirement Planning for Solo Agers: A Retirement and Aging Roadmap for Single and Childless Adults.”
A
good way to start is to think about things that adult children do for
older parents and consider how you’re going to do all of that yourself
or with outside assistance, she said.
In her
book, Geber lists the responsibilities that adult children frequently
take on: They serve as caregivers, help older parents figure out where
to live, provide emotional and practical support, assist with financial
issues such as managing money, and agree to serve as health-care or
legal decision-makers when a parent becomes incapacitated.
Also, older parents often rely on adult children for regular social contact and a sense of connectedness.
Planning for challenges that can arise with
advancing age is essential for people who go it alone, advised Sara Zeff
Geber, a retirement coach and author of “Essential Retirement Planning for Solo Agers: A Retirement and Aging Roadmap for Single and Childless Adults.”
A
good way to start is to think about things that adult children do for
older parents and consider how you’re going to do all of that yourself
or with outside assistance, she said.
In her
book, Geber lists the responsibilities that adult children frequently
take on: They serve as caregivers, help older parents figure out where
to live, provide emotional and practical support, assist with financial
issues such as managing money, and agree to serve as health-care or
legal decision-makers when a parent becomes incapacitated.
Also, older parents often rely on adult children for regular social contact and a sense of connectedness.
In New York, Wendl Kornfeld, 69, began running
year-long workshops for small groups of solo agers four years ago.
Though married, she and her 80-year-old husband consider themselves
future solo agers living together. “We figured out a long time ago one
of us was going to survive the other,” she said.
At
those gatherings, Kornfeld asked people to jettison denial about aging
and imagine the absolute worst things that might happen to them,
physically and socially. Then, people talked about how they might
prepare for those eventualities.
“The whole
purpose of these get-togethers was to be fearless, face issues head-on
and not keep our heads in the sand,” Kornfeld said. “Then, we can plan
for what might happen, stop worrying and start enjoying the best years
of our lives.”
Full Article & Source:
‘Elder orphans,’ without kids or spouses, face old age alone.
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