Elder Path

Wow, I loved this! Living funerals are so cathartic and healing and yes, humor and death sit at the same table 🙌

A list of phone numbers is not a care plan.

Hospital case managers and social workers are good at their jobs and stretched impossibly thin. So when your family is discharged, what you often get handed is two pages of phone numbers. Facilities, communities, agencies. Company name, company number.

There is no meat and potatoes there. Nothing about which places have openings. Nothing about what they actually cost. Nothing about which ones are right for your parent's level of care, or which ones you should walk out of.

You are handed a directory and expected to build a plan from it, during the worst week of your year.

That gap is the whole reason Elder Path exists.

Save this for the day someone hands you the list.

Alzheimer's and dementia support is where this work started for me.

I worked for hospice. I interned in memory care units. I moved families into memory care myself. I earned my hand over hand approach certification through Teepa Snow, and I have worked with the Alzheimer's Association for over eighteen years.

I did not pick this specialty by accident.

Here is why it still pulls at me. With a dementia diagnosis, the family is losing their person slowly, and at the same time that person is losing their independence. Two griefs running at once, in the same house, usually with nobody outside the family noticing either one.

That is a lot to hold without help. It should not be held without help.

Follow along if you are walking this with someone you love.

If you are Googling assisted living at midnight, you are not behind. You are just doing this alone.

The search history gives it away. Difference between skilled nursing and a nursing home. How to find the best assisted living facility. How do I make sure my kids are more prepared than I was.

The internet will give you forty tabs and no plan, because it cannot see your parent, your budget, or your family.

One conversation with someone who knows the Chattanooga options does more than a week of searching.

Close the tabs. Talk to a real person. Link in bio.

Safe discharge planning is really just slowing down a scary process.

It is Friday at four o'clock. The hospital says your mom is being discharged. Case management is not picking up. The facilities you were handed on a printout are not answering either.

That is usually the moment families call me, and that is exactly the window where having someone who can reach a real person on a cell phone changes the outcome.

The work itself is not complicated. It is asking the right questions before anyone signs anything. What is the situation at home. What funds are actually behind this. Is this a temporary setting before a bigger move, or the real placement. Do we need in-home care, home health, palliative, hospice, short-term skilled nursing, long-term skilled nursing.

Families are not supposed to know how to maneuver all of that. It is not a failure that you do not.

If you are in that window right now, book a free discovery call. Link in bio.

The sibling who handles everything. You know exactly who you are.

You are the one who takes the call from the doctor. Who knows which pharmacy, which cardiologist, which day the aide comes. Who fields the group chat asking for an update you already sent twice.

Nobody elected you. It just landed on you, and you picked it up, because someone had to.

Here is the part that gets missed. Being the capable one does not mean you have to be the only one. There are people whose entire job is to carry the parts you were never trained for. The insurance calls. The facility tours. The paperwork nobody explains.

You can hand some of this over.

Send this to the sibling who needs to see it.