Brian Herd - Avoiding the Ageing Parent Trap: How to plan ahead and prevent legal and family issues

My qualifications to be your tea leaves soothsayer, or crystal ball doomsayer for you and your ageing parents, are a combination of the personal and the professional.

I am in my 68th year on earth. Most significantly, I am a baby boomer, a term I abhor but which many of us identify with. I am also a parent of adult children.

Along with my four siblings, I am also the product of two, very matured aged parents (90 & 91). They recently took up residency in an aged care facility and, until my father's recent death, they remained confident they would each receive a message from the Queen on their respective 100th birthday. Regrettably now, from my mum's point of view, given the Queen's current age, it may well be the King.

All their parenting lives, they had been sacrificial exemplars for their children hard working, dedicated, loving, caring, supportive and, all the while, mostly due to the growing-up needs of their children, poor. They had their usual bouts of annoyance and irritation with each other, often over trivia was it a Tuesday or a Wednesday? To this we have coined an acronym DIM -Does it Matter! which we all dutifully sound out to them when a bout was brewing.

While they got frustrated with each other, made worse by their limitations, it was obvious that they loved each other. While my mum is in relatively good health, albeit living with a synergy of increasing frailty and fragility, side by side with her constant constellation of companions the medicos and the medication. Their social lives revolved around frequent contact with their children, extended family and excursions to their friendly stable of health professionals. Until recently, their 25-year-old car sat forlornly in their garage, like a sphinx, a symbol of the past.

Along with my siblings, my family world now includes being to my parents what they have been to me, in a time of their increased dependency and reliance. Life has again come full circle.

As a result, with grown up children, I no longer wait for that dreaded call from the childcare centre Your child is sick, please come quickly and take her home. Now the looming spectre is a call from the adult care centre, a hospital Your mother has had a fall, she cant go home, and weve done all we can for her, but she cant stay here. There are others more deserving and shes a bed blocker, etc.

Parenting is always a constant process of event management, or, sometimes, crisis management, whether it is for your children or your parents. Occasionally, events can transcend both spheres of life and all at the same time. "The question is... are you ready?

I am a lawyer and have been for over 35 years. For many years, I have been a happy lawyer. I practice in Elder Law or law relating to older people and Ive waited a long time to write this book so that I could distil all those years of experience. Contrary to my perception of public perception, I think that makes me useful. It has given me the opportunity to give credence to that mantra, Doing well, by doing good.

My coming to Elder Law is a story in itself and the result of some epiphanies.

Some years ago, about 2001, initially more by way of chance, I chose to abandon the traditional lucrative areas of law in the cut and thrust, if not, trench warfare of commercial law and litigation. A combination of factors drew me to a new and emerging area of legal practice known as Elder Law (which is not necessarily immune from warfare).

The first was happenstance. Why she chose me I dont remember, but a DON (Director of Nursing) from a small aged care facility called me one day. Her voice had a tired, desperate tone. She needed help to resolve a simmering dispute between the facility and the six adult daughters of a resident. The daughters, or at least some of them, were alleging that the facility was starving their mother to death.

There I was sitting in the DONs office, discussing what was clearly a distressing experience for her. At one point, she pushed an open book across the table to me and, almost pleadingly said, See, this is proof shes not starving. I naturally responded, Whats that? As quick as you like, she responded, Its our bowel book! When I regained my composure, I repeated myself, Whats that? It was, she carefully explained, a comprehensive record of each residents bowel movements for every day of their lives in the facility. She pointed to the page she had opened and took me to the record of the resident which, it seemed, clearly showed regular and, regular amounts of, movement.

There was more. She then handed me a small, laminated card. It was, she almost proudly explained, their stool tool-pictures (in vivid colour) of the surprisingly broad types of stools we humans are capable of producing. Each variety, apparently, painted a picture of the health (or otherwise) of a resident. Every member of staff was required to pin the tool to their uniform each day on their rounds for a ready reckoning of the quality of a residents movement. In the residents case, they were distinctly conventional, with no hint of abnormalities.

This was my first foray into the bowels of aged care and, as it turned out, it was a revelation and the start of my voyage into the deep recesses of ageing.

Since then, I have devoted myself to the calling of Elder Law or law relating to older people and their families. I follow the mantra Doing Well by Doing Good. For many lawyers, the aspiration of doing good has become slightly perverted it has become more about winning, not good over evil, or right over wrong just winning. With families, the last environment you want to create is that of winners and losers. With that attitude, everyone is a loser.

I see myself as a law bringer, a fact giver and, ultimately, a way finder. I first came across way finding as a profession when I happened to sit next to a woman on an aircraft. After we came to an understanding about the use of our mutual arm rest, she made the usual entre enquiry and what do you do? I told the truth Im a lawyer. Her head turned quietly away in silence, slightly deflated. Ah, such is my lot in life.

I then reciprocated the query. She came back to life, enthusiastically replying, I am a way finder. That Pauline Hanson look of Please explain was written all over my face. I had esoteric visions of a spruiker, life coach or some personal stylist. But it was far more utilitarian. She had been a psychologist and an industrial designer, (a curious combination in itself), but now, she combined them both to undertake way finding. Put simply, it involved being engaged by large institutions to advise them on how people could find their way more easily around their sprawling edifice. As an example, she was on her way to New Zealand to ply her trade for a large public hospital.

So it is that, in addressing the convoluted needs and demands of families with the smorgasbord of personalities, sense of entitlement, and agendas, not to mention the various amounts of goodness and badness exposed in the stress of addressing parent problems, I would like this book to represent a personal and a professional plea no winners and losers please, just some way finding.

As his foreword recounts, we have known each other for a long time. We have matured together. His expertise, enthusiasm and entreaties to do this book, kept me going in those many hours of just me and my laptop. He is a fine motivator for the power of knowledge as a basis for good decision making in our lives. He loves to help, as he has done for many others, for many years. I have been privileged to be helped so generously.