Navigating the “Shift” with Intention and Honor: 12 Ways to Care for Aging Parents
In the Ten Commandments, the first four commandments speak to our relationship and behavior toward God. The fifth commandment shifts to relationships with other people: “Honor your father and your mother, that you may live a long time in the land the LORD your God is giving to you.” I have always found it significant that this first commandment addressing human to human behavior is about family.
For the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, family relationships matter.
How do we honor our parents? As children it meant obeying and respecting them, living in harmony with the rest of our family. But how is this command lived out when we are adults?
For my husband and I, honoring has meant helping and caring for our aging parents in intentional ways that enriched their lives and helped keep them safe and healthy. But unlike when we ourselves became parents and experienced the seismic shift of the responsibilities of parenthood on a single day, caring for parents has been a slow, gradual shift.
As we shifted, my husband and I have worked to be intentional in ways that honor and love our parents well. In the process we have realized that there are two distinct aspects of caring for aging parents.
The first is caring for their spiritual/psychological needs.
The second is caring for the physical/material needs.
We also learned that if you care well for the spiritual and psychological aspects of your parents’ lives before they need help, addressing their physical and material needs as they arise later is less stressful. As a result, areas that may be challenging, such as assisting with health issues or finances, become easier to discuss and manage if needed because you have built strong bonds with your parents as an adult.
Here are six activities that help care for your parents’ spiritual and psychological needs as they age.
Pray for them regularly and specifically. Ask them about any particular needs for which you can pray. Keep a journal of these prayers. As you see God answer and provide, the evidence of His love and care will strengthen your faith. Sharing the answered prayers with your parents will encourage them
Call them regularly. This does not have to be every day. It helps to agree to a time or day for a call and commit to it. For decades, I called my mother every Saturday just to chat. Sometimes we might talk 15 minutes, sometimes an hour. We both always looked forward to it each week.
Visit regularly in person when possible. If you live near your parents, this may be a 15-minute drop in once or twice a week. If, like me, you live in another town or even another state, you will have to be more intentional about your visits. But whether you live near or far, there is nothing as wonderful as a visit from your children. It shows your parents that you care enough about them to give them your personal time. And, your parents love your own children, their grandchildren. Bring them along when possible. (Remember, you are setting the example of how to love and care for parents for your own children.)
Learn about your parents’ lives. Ask them to tell you stories about their childhood, their siblings, their school days. Ask them to tell you their love story. Go through old photographs and mark the names of people you do not know. Sharing these memories will bring them joy. It will also teach you about your parents and make you appreciate their struggles and accomplishments. If possible, record these on video or audio. Digital records of your parents will be precious in the future.
Find a shared interest and participate in it with them. It may be something as simple as listening to great music or going to their favorite restaurant. My husband watched football games on TV with his father. I regularly took my mother to a sweet town in the NC mountains she visited annually as a child. Shared activities build a special bond, allow for good times of communication and common memories.
Make friends with their friends. Learn their names and get their phone numbers and contact information. They can be great resource for ideas and support for parents as well as help in emergency situations. My mother’s friends have become very special in my life.
These actions will build and strengthen your adult-to-adult relationship with your parents. This helps in two ways.
You will be better able you to anticipate your parents’ needs and recognize when they begin to require help or support.
They open opportunities for your parents to ask for help when they need it.
But, the hard truth is that parents rarely ask for help, and often do not realize that they need it. Spending time with them opens the door for you to quietly provide support. It may be as simple as help with maintaining their home so that they can continue to live there safely. Do they need help with yard work, moving furniture for a safer layout, or even changing a light bulb in a location that requires a stool or step ladder? These are easy areas of physical need where you might help your parents.
Just as with the spiritual and psychological areas of their lives, there are key actions that you can take to assist with their physical and material needs. Often, we do not know what information, documents and legal directives are needed to assist our parents until we are in the middle of a crisis and realize that either we do not have the information or do not have access to it. Here are some of the actions and the information we have gathered that have been essential to help us help our parents.
Gather personal information and record it in a spreadsheet. If they want to keep financial information private, create the spreadsheet and let them fill out the information themselves. You may need the information to pay bills or access funds for their care. The key information you collect will help you care for them in the event of an emergency or illness.
a. The Social Security number for each of your parents.
b. Name of every financial institution and the associated account numbers. The name of their financial advisor if they have one as well as contact information.
c. Long Term Care policy information, Life Insurance information can be included in this spreadsheet.
d. Health Insurance information. You will need their Medicare information as well as the name of any other health insurance provider and member numbers.
e. The names, phone numbers, and addresses for each of their doctors. Are you on their HIPPA form so that you can get information about your parents in the event of a medical emergency?
f. Monthly bills and expenses they have and costs. This will help you manage their money in the event that you need to step in and assist them.
Do your parents have a will? If not, take steps to assist them in making a will. If they do have a will, where is it? You will need to know where it is and to be able to quickly access it if needed.
Who is the Power of Attorney and Health Care Power of attorney for each of your parents? Where are the POA documents so that they can be accessed if needed?
Are there actions you need to take to make their home safer? We added handrails to the steps from my mother’s garage into her house after she had back surgery. We recently added a zero-clearance shower with a bench, a handheld shower and handicap rails. We also widened the door to the toilet room so that she can get in it with a walker.
Do your parents have a health care directive? At every hospital visit they may have, as well as many doctor’s appointments, they will be asked whether they have an advanced directive. This will communicate their desires and allows you to know their thoughts and to honor them in the event of an emergency or end of life situation.
Finally, what are your parents’ wishes for their funeral? This last one is difficult, I admit. You may decide to put this off until your parents are at an advanced age. But my personal experience with this taught me that the conversations can have great beauty and be a tremendous blessing.
My own father had a rare, terminal cancer that took his life about 10 weeks after the diagnosis. During those last weeks he asked me to be his spiritual mentor and to plan his funeral. We spoke at length about his wishes. He wanted the Baptist hymns of his youth. He wanted the service to bring people together in love and worship. And he did NOT want the service to be on a weekend! “Why ruin a perfectly good Saturday?” he said. And so, we planned it together, and it was one of the most grace filled, sweetest times of my life with my father.
Approach this with prayer. If your parents are not ready to have this conversation, let it rest until a later date.
All the actions I have outlined are born from love and gratitude to your parents.
Never approach them in a way that makes them feel that they are losing their personal autonomy and independence. Always lead with grace, love, and patience.
Every individual handles aging in their own way. Some will be happy for assistance. Other parents may resist because they fear aging and losing their independence.
Don’t push, but be consistent in your effort to both build a strong relationship and be prepared for the future. The effort is worth it.
If you have a bumpy relationship with your parents, I encourage you to try the six actions that address their spiritual and psychological needs to strengthen and improve your relationship now. Then as things improve, your love and care for them will make it easier to begin to address the other scenarios in the future.
Remember, your parents are accustomed to caring for you. The slow shift that occurs as you begin to care for them in new ways can be smooth and joyful as you strengthen bonds through intentional care that meets their specific needs and personalities. It lays a good foundation for the next phase of assisting them with their physical and material needs when time comes.
If you prepare for the shift, you can avoid a lot of the stress commonly associated with caring for aging parents, and experience great blessings in this phase of life.