Send this to Mom and Dad
If your folks aren’t prepared, this might spur them into action. If they’ve done their homework, then you might want to thank them for their foresight.
Get It All on Paper
Without Vital Documents, Aging and Incapacity Put Families in a Terrible Bind
By Dale Russakoff
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 25, 2007; F01
For years, Sandy Myers prodded her parents without result to plan for “when they got really, really old.” With her mother losing ground to Alzheimer’s and her father to Parkinson’s, she pressed harder: Let’s see a lawyer. Let’s go over your assets with an accountant. Still they didn’t budge.
“They’d kind of humor me: ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ ” Myers recalled.
In the end, it wasn’t nice at all. In 1999, her father, Carl Larson, injured his head in a fall and had to move into an assisted living facility, forcing Myers to put her mother in a nursing home. The family needed to sell the couple’s three-bedroom, 1950s ranch home in Springfield to pay the bills, but couldn’t: Joan Larson’s Alzheimer’s left her legally incompetent to sign the deed, and she hadn’t authorized anyone to sign for her.
