This is an eldercare problem I wish everybody had.

This has not been my personal experience.

I thought that dysfunction was just the particular circumstances of our family.  We undertook elder care alone.  We did not ask for cooperation because we had no idea what we were getting involved in.  Help was ever offered.

This is what got me started in this whole elder care project.  The question I wanted answered was, “How do families handle the issue of elder care?”  I started talking to people who now had to provide unpaid elder care.  Their experiences were similar to mine.

I have certain paradigms in mind when I think about families.  I think about my own natal family.  My father dropped out of high school to support his family during the Depression.  After serving four years in the Pacific he married my mother.  He worked two full time jobs to support five children.  Whatever problems came up we solved as a family.

Our family lived on the third floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn.  My maternal grandparents had eleven children and they lived on the two lower floors.

My maternal grandfather had some kind of dementia.  Everybody who was home looked after him.  He was never institutionalized.  Dealing with the issues around elder care was never a problem.  This is how I thought all families would come together.

During an unguarded moment, however, my Grandfather ended his life by drinking from what he thought was a bottle of lemonade.  It was, in fact, a bottle of cloudy ammonia.

If there are families where there are members who do want to participate in the care of their parent(s), then their biggest problem will be in setting up some kind of decision making apparatus to insure that all voices are heard but that gridlock does not ensue.

Again, I wish I had the problem of too many people interested in elder care.