Ok, so this is a little bit of a weird post, bit I couldn't think of where else to post it and it's very important.
My mom has advanced ALS. We don't expect her to make it more than a couple months. If she makes it to April I'll be extremely surprised.
She lives with my dad who is self employed. Because her condition is so advanced, he has to be with her full time. It is EXTREMELY draining on him. His health isn't the best, he's in his 60's and not well able to lift 115 pounds up and down from the bed several times a day. He has serious arthritis which means he barely has strength to grab things with his hands...it's just a bad situation. And because he is self-employed he isn't making money since he's looking after my mom full time. There is some life insurance on her that I think he's probably counting on when she dies, but I'm skeptical that he'll be able to collect it even though he thinks he will. I think he refinanced the house to somehow have a little more cash, but honestly I don't know how he's paying for anything.
He has hospice care coming (medicare pays for that I think) but they only come for 2 hours a day twice a week and they can't help my mom go to the bathroom or feed her (she has a feeding tube) so they're only marginally useful.
Women from his church have been coming over several times a week to give him an hour here and two hours there to do things like run to the grocery store or run to the bank and whatnot. He INSISTS on paying them even though they don't want it. But then they've been going back to the church and saying "We don't want this money. We're doing this as their friends not to make money. We want to give this money back to the church". So they have and the church has been putting it in a special fund for my dad. Last time my wife and I were visiting (we're about 4 hours away) we talked to the pastor and he said they had about $12,000 saved up for my dad if they could find a way to get him to accept it. It's tricky though because he absolutely WILL NOT ACCEPT any money from the church. There's nothing anyone in can say to get him to change his mind.
So my wife finds this ALS grant that will bring in respite care to help him out and allow him to do a little work, get out of the house, take a nap, etc. So we told him, "Look we got this grant, it's going to pay for caretakers to come in and help you out four days a week for 8 hours a day." The idea being, after the grant money runs out (it ought to last about two weeks) we'll just quietly keep paying for the caretakers to come with the money that the church has set aside for him. My wife told him not to worry about it, we'd take care of the billing and everything. He agreed and my wife and I were pleased that we'd found a solution to this problem.
Fast forward a week, we get a call from the ALS grant people and everything is in order but...uh oh. They need to make all the checks out to my Mom. So now we're screwed. Because my dad will know now if the grant people stop paying and the church starts paying. Which means one of two things. Either:
A. He takes the two weeks of respite care that the ALS grant gives him and then stops.
or
B. He keeps paying for the respite care out of his own pocket which I don't see how he could possibly afford. When we were up for Christmas he told me that when he files his 2017 taxes he will have made $0. And I believe it.
Sooooo...anyway. That's the story. Any ideas? Any suggestions? Any thoughts about how we might be able to pay off these care workers without my dad knowing the money is coming from the church?
Submitted January 17, 2018 at 11:24AM by flightpath1199 http://ift.tt/2DeFcxl
