pilsenites

Let’s talk about the dough situation. Once a person crosses over from an elderly person who can walk to an elderly person who can no longer walk, they move into the realm of the surreal, financially speaking. This is the point at which it becomes clear that their entire life savings will be gone in about ten minutes and they will become dependent on the state. This will happen to us all.

A little background information, and this is the most I will talk about family ancestry, I promise: my grandparents never had any money. Never. Had. ANY. Money. My grandfather worked his entire life, since he was 13 or 14, and was robbed of his high school education, because he had to work to help support his enormous family. He was one of eleven children. His father was a cabinetmaker. My grandmother, though an only child (rather rare in that time and place) also came from a modest background. Her father was a machinist. As was typical at the time, my great grandmothers didn’t work, and my grandmother, being a (40s and) 50s wife, did not work either once she and my grandfather married. They had two daughters. A few years after I came along, he was near retirement and decided to finally buy a house, with a low interest loan, thanks to the GI bill. The house was on the southwest side of Chicago, a bungalow, and it cost a little over $25,000 in 1975. The understanding was that my unmarried mother and I would move in with them and she would help pay the mortgage. The mortgage payment was just over $200 a month. A 30 year mortgage, of course. I saw the original contract once–don’t know where it is now, alas– and their down payment was in the hundreds of dollars. I smile just thinking about that.

Despite what sounds like crazy easy living, $200-something a month for the mortgage was in fact a stretch for us in the 70s and the 80s. My mother got married (to a ripe bastard) and moved away. My grandfather was retired but drew no pension, having moved from low-wage job to low-wage job, and received only a Social Security check. My grandmother’s Social Security check was miniscule; she’d had a few low paying jobs (factories, shops) when she was still single. And to boot, they found themselves, in their 50s and 60s, raising a kid. Although both my parents were alive and kicking and in their twenties, which is usually when able-bodied people have jobs and are somehow involved in supporting the kids they created, my grandparents received no help. Okay. Enough there. So there were serious, hideous money shortages, lousy, shitty privations of all kind; descriptions here would not do them justice, and besides, there’s no point. Old people and little kids should not have to be so penniless. The house was almost lost once. It’s purely good luck that it wasn’t.

Many years later…Many years later, I am moving and want them to sell that house that I grew up in and move with me and my husband. They couldn’t take care of the house. It had become shockingly decrepit. The house was now in the middle of a food desert, and though he drove for a really long time, he outlived his ability to do so and had to give that up. It was like they were marooned on a sinking ship. They said yes. That house. That beat up house that sat without needed repairs and that probably had structural damage and mold issues and God knows what else–that house was now worth something. It was a house on Chicago soil and this was in the mid 2000s, before the housing bubble crashed. Someone would try to flip it. I found them a realtor and offers poured in SIGHT UNSEEN. The first one fell through, but the second one did not, and the interested party–what do you know? A contractor, who planned to flip it– elected to skip an inspection. Now they had a nice nest egg, what I will only refer to hereafter as a “Little Bit of Money.” (Yes, Fargo reference. No, it was not anywhere near the fortune in the suitcase in Fargo.) I will say that it was more money than my grandfather made in his entire life, from 1937 to 1973, and I have his SS lifetime earnings statement to prove it. They were surprised and amused and dazzled to hear how much it had sold for.

This little bit of money sat there for the last four and a half years. They did not go out and buy a bunch of stuff. Their needs were and are modest. Basically, it sat in savings and checking accounts and I occasionally persuaded them to put some of it into CDs, at least. When the CDs matured, they didn’t roll them over, but put the money back into their savings accounts. “As they like,” was my attitude. It’s their money. They joked about sitting on this money. “What are we gonna do with it?” I pointed out to them, and my mother and aunt, that the money would come in handy should one or both of them have certain medical needs. In October of last year, he fell. He needed a hospital stay. It was just a UTI. In the very elderly, a UTI causes tremendous weakness, and falls are common. When he fell, he hurt his (already bad) knee. While in the hospital, he had a stroke. So, he could not be released, of course, but needed nursing home care, rehabilitation. This would turn into a very long stay. Suddenly it became obvious that that little bit of money was nothing at all.

Last major point I want to make: when they reached retirement age and began collecting SS checks, they were eligible to sign up for Medicare. They did so. Medicare Part A comes to everyone. Medicare Part B, on the other hand, requires a monthly co-pay of about $50. This was the amount at the time, I believe, and today it’s still under $100. Ordinarily, I would check for the exact figure, to be sure I’m not misspeaking, but I have looked at too much paperwork of late and am in no mood to look for factoids, blog be damned. They opted out. $50 a month, back then, was simply not possible.

Please note: opting out of Medicare Part B is a gargantuan mistake. For anyone. When your time comes to retire, and you are offered Part B and any other parts that may exist in the future, say “yes” to everything. If you don’t have the money for the co-pays, find it or steal it.

Pardon the cliché. Who knows, this might become a blog about many things, but right now it’s going to be about helping my grandfather at the end of his life. I was always the one who got on the phone, the one who filled out the forms, the one who cleared up the questionable charges on bills.  Many kids translate for their parents; my grandparents spoke perfectly flat, Chicago-accented English, but my services were still required. It’s so simple, it hardly requires an explanation: when you’re raised by old people, you see that they’re tired. They’ve had it. “Here, you do it.” You take on the role of mouthpiece gladly. There is also the tendency on the part of seriously working class parents to let their better educated offspring kind of… take over dealing with officialdom. So you learn how to have that particular voice, how to walk into someone’s office with purpose, how to look The Man in the face and state your business. So after about twenty years of having this role, I’m prepared–sort of. This is an enormous thing. I’m managing all aspects of a life.  I have power of attorney. I’m speaking for him, signing my name to represent his interests. I’m the walking and talking and able him now.  I manage his money and am trying to do this wisely, despite the fact that I’ve never been particularly good at managing my own money. I am navigating the system as him, applying for all the funding and benefits I can get my hands on. I now know the limits of Medicare, what Medicaid offers, and what the VA health system can do for him–and thankfully, it can do a lot. I know every aspect of his daily routine, every health concern and medication, every pain. I know what he can eat and what he can’t, and what he really wants to eat, and I am the one who orders it or shops for it and instructs his aides how to feed it to him. I know what he’s afraid of and what he’s okay with. I have to hold my head for a moment after I finish writing this paragraph.

All the things that are involved in helping someone die– all the phone calls and meetings with all the new people–doctors, aides, therapists, bureaucrats–who must now come in and out of my grandfather’s life on a daily basis, all the sorting out of forms and receipts and stacking the appropriate papers into little piles, all the appointments scheduled and written on my calendar– all of this keeps me very busy, keeps my mind from lingering on the fact that soon he won’t be here anymore. Lately I’ve been so consumed with getting everything in its right place that I have to stop myself from running around their apartment and make sure I sit down and just look at him and talk to him, even on the days he doesn’t seem terribly into talking. He had a fall, and then a stroke and, at 94, it has weakened him tremendously. But he has all his marbles (to borrow one of my grandparents’ phrases) and is always happy I’m there. Even though some days his voice is very weak, he still opens his eyes wide when he sees me. I tell him what’s new, and then I ask him a lot of questions, giving him a lot to answer “yes” or “no” to, as he’s always been very succinct, and we have our conversations.

I feel bad that he can’t walk. He was walking in September. Walking ended in October. How could it be so final? He wants to get up, to go out every day like he has his entire life–all the way up to that miserable day in October. I know he’s bored. He can understand me, and I see him thinking, but his speech was affected and you can tell it takes quite a bit of effort for him to say a lot of words. I am especially sad about his being bored. He doesn’t want to watch television, and yet all he can do is watch television. He’d like to fix things again, and make things, but that’s over. How can I make him young again? How can I give him more years? These are the crazed thoughts I have when I’m the most upset. It’s no good to ask these questions, so I’ll knock it off.