Musings of the Night Nurse [1]

A new series on caretaking my mom as she nears the end while fighting off the entities who prey on the old

You’re traveling, and as you do each Friday, you get a text from one of your mother’s caregivers. Lanee is not your favorite; in addition to having two of your mother’s caregivers paid through Lanee’s agency, which you later learn consists of nothing more than Lanee taking 20% of their pay, she housecleans badly for something like $75 an hour. Your brother pays that bill and so the only interaction you have with Lanee, who several times tells you in a voice that sounds like honey-dipped Newports just how very much she loves your bed-bound mother, is CashApp-ing her $1950 a week.

This Friday, however, the bill is for $2250. You text Lanee: how can this be? Oh, well, she says, #1’s shift was covered by #2. Riiight… you say, but then it should be the same amount, a concept Lanee claims to not understand but says she’ll recheck her numbers. Well gee, turns out she goofed, and yes, it’s the usual $1950.

You are not traveling the next time Lanee sends you an invoice, you are sitting with your mother and caregiver #1, to whom you ask, do you send Lanee your hours every week? Caregiver #1’s face goes a little gray; I knew, she says, she was up-charging you. You ask to see the hours she sent Lanee, which do not match the ones Lanee sent you, and so you send her a text saying her services will no longer be needed. This causes Lanee to go on a mad texting spree, to your brother, to caregiver #1, tellingly not to you, knowing that if she did, you would gather all the receipts and know, if too late, that she’s ripped you off for thousands of dollars and that you might choose to spend some of your time chasing that money. But she knows you won’t do this. Baked into Lanee’s brand of petty thievery is the fact that there are many more urgent fires for you to put out. You would like Lanee to feel shame but understand she will not, also, that there is job security for the Lanees of the world, capitalizing as they do on the anxieties and desperation of people navigating their loved ones’ incapacitation.

You commit to keeping a better eye on things, but in your defense you cannot anticipate all the tactics of the many, many, many individuals and institutions ready to rip off the elderly, the phone scammers who variously call your mother to say she’s won a Mercedes or that the cops are coming to arrest her, the fake extended car warranties that arrive in the mail by the day, the lawyer who phones a call center in the Philippines in the middle of the night trying to break into your mother’s investment accounts, the trust officers who after 18 months of not fulfilling their obligations refer to your mother in an email by the wrong first name. What you can do is get better at recognizing the miscreancy and act like a Shaolin warrior, if a sometimes clumsy one, knocking down threats as they come. Also you can write.

Welcome to Musings of the Night Nurse, a new series on caretaking my mom as she nears the end, while fighting off the entities who prey on the old, and boy howdy are there an unending supply of those. Last night, a friend told me how her mom got taken in by an AI of Dr. Sanjay Gupta hawking $300 anti-dementia pills. This, on top of the $20,000+ a month she is paying for home care for both parents. Girl, I feel you. There are variations but the situation, I am learning, is common: a parent falls, hip replacement surgery meant to get him or her walking again does not; advancing dementia, 24/7 caregivers, the money running out. Starting this Sunday, I will take over most of the night time care for my once vibrant, always in motion mother, who now cannot move her own body and to whom I gave a baby doll for Christmas.

If this sounds dire I don’t mean it to. I am in truth very lucky. Mom lives in a large comfortable home. There is care money as soon as the trust officers do what they were hired to do [insert laugh track]. I have a fantastic list of books given to me by my new pal Seb Junger; I may rewatch the entire Mad Men series, and I will have my days to work.

Will I be telling tales on the thieves and miscreants? Oh you know it. Also sweet stories. I hope to post for you most days, and will record the entries the following day if you prefer to listen. Some entries will be paywalled, discount code below. And if you want to share stories of caregiving, and some tips (I could use them!), by all means do so in the comments xx