The Springwell Blog

Lillie was amazed at how quickly she became a caregiver to her 84-year old mother. Her mom, who lived alone in the Sudbury home she had owned for 32 years, began calling Lillie when she fell and wasn’t able to get up. Each call was distressing, and also meant that Lillie needed to drop her family responsibilities and drive nearly an hour to help. Soon, her mom was sleeping on Lillie’s couch in Allston for safety, and that was what led Lillie to set up her first meeting with Sara Stein, Springwell’s Options Counselor. Looking back, however, Lillie realizes that there were probably earlier signs that her mom wasn’t doing as well as she thought.

“She stopped cooking for herself, using mostly canned and processed foods, and wasn’t eating properly. She might have been taking her medications incorrectly,” Lillie says. She also realizes that her mom had bruises and scrapes that Lillie didn’t attribute to a systemic or safety problem until the calls started coming. “Now I think that she was declining cognitively for a while before we realized there was a problem,” Lillie reflects.

When it comes to challenges related to aging, many family members – especially adult children – have trouble adjusting to the change in perspective necessary to take on trying to solve a problem they see in their parent’s day-to-day life. This is one of the reasons it is very common that a family finds itself in the middle of an unsustainable problematic situation that feels like it is coming out of the blue. It’s the kind of situation that an Options Counselor like Springwell’s Sara Stein can help address.

Sara met with Lillie, her husband, and her mother all together in the Springwell library and quickly identified that finding a safe living situation was everyone’s primary objective, although each person had a different perspective and concerns to be addressed. Sara outlined some options, including living at home with in-home supports, and presented some of the details of assisted living programs. Together they went over each option, reviewing potential costs, challenges and barriers. Through this discussion, Lillie and her family identified an assisted living facility closer to Allston as the best option to pursue. As Sara points out, “Once that decision was made, there was still so much work to make it all happen, and much of that work fell to Lillie. I was able to follow up with resources on preparing and selling the Sudbury house, for example, but Lillie had to follow through and make it all happen.”

Lillie’s mom has been in an assisted living program a few miles from Lillie’s home for about a year now. Her Options Counseling relationship with Sara has closed, but Lillie has connected with Springwell’s Caregiver Specialist for support adjusting to this new phase of her relationship with her mom. She also knows that Options Counseling is a resource she can return to if a new issue arises.