Hard-Won Advice in Books on Aging and Elder Care<br />Ms. Gross’s raw honesty about her feelings about all of this — often fair<br />and sometimes not, by her own admission — makes this book mandatory reading for any man with a sister who wants to be thoughtful about planning for aging parents.<br />There is no sugarcoating the number of physical and emotional challenges<br />that come with aging, so it’s clear why Ms. Veney’s upbeat memoir of the years she has spent caring for her mother, Doris Woodward, who has dementia, is so appealing.<br />The author, a former New York Times reporter whom I’ve never met save for a few encounters on social media, is unafraid to admit all the mistakes she made out of sheer ignorance<br />and how often even the most high-functioning adult children simply do not know what they do not know.<br />Once you’ve got a fracture there, there’s a 40 percent chance you’ll end up in a nursing home and a 20 percent chance you’ll never walk again.<br />But a smaller number of people wrote in unprompted to assign me homework — books<br />that they found useful as they were navigating their own changing conditions or those of spouses, close friends or other family members.<br />Already, the majority of Americans need Medicaid to pay for at least some of<br />their nursing home costs or care at home because they’ve run out of money.<br />The book explains the financial side of her mother’s care — including her eventual qualification for Medicaid — plain as day.<br />Women often lose out twice or more in the aging derby, first when they take on disproportionate responsibility for their aging parents<br />and then again when they outlive their spouses in old age.
