By Steve Moran

My heart is breaking. … The system is woefully broken.

I have a lifelong friend by the name of Dennis, and by lifelong I mean our moms were bathing us in the same tub before we could walk, talk, or crawl, and our dads were best friends growing up. But that was nearly 70 years ago.

By happenstance, when we first moved to Sacramento, we discovered we lived in the same neighborhood, only four houses apart.

Today

Today both my parents and his dad are gone. His mom has lived alone as an unmarried widow for many, many years in a small Southern California desert town. Now in her 90s, her mind and body are failing her. It has finally gotten to the point that she can no longer live alone, and this is where the rub is.

She makes too much money to qualify for public assistance and too little to afford senior living. Some years ago, someone talked her into taking out a reverse mortgage on her home. Most of that money is gone. She receives a small pension and a modest payment from Social Security — that’s it.

And she wants to stay in her own home.

Her declining cognitive ability has been accompanied by frustration and anger. This is one of the downsides of modern medicine that is rarely ever talked about. We have become really good at prolonging the lives of our physical bodies but often not our brains, and we have made very little progress with even figuring out what to do when the brain quits working right.

Making It All Worse

Not knowing what else to do, Dennis packed his car and made a temporary move to live in his mom’s house as her caregiver. In order to do this he left his home and wife behind. He is fortunate to have a remote job so he can continue to work from her house.

But the isolation, being a caretaker 24/7, the lack of family support, and the lack of friends is killing him emotionally and physically. This is why my heart is breaking. Right now, he feels stuck until … and this sounds so harsh, she dies or gets so much worse she will be forced into a nursing home.

A Broken System

It is a stupid system we have, where people who are extremely poor have more options available than people who have limited resources. This represents a huge opportunity for someone who can figure this all out. Is this a senior living opportunity? It feels like it, but I am honestly not sure.

It may also be that someone is going to read this and go, “I actually know how to fix this.” I would love to hear from you, because if there are solutions out there they are painfully not obvious.

He needs help, or he too will need expensive care. We as a nation need to do better than this.