It was a memorable place to have an “aha” moment about aging.
Peter Sperry had taken his 82-year-old father, who’d had a stroke and used a wheelchair, to Disney World. Just after they’d made their way through the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, nature called. Sperry took his father to the bathroom where, with difficulty, he changed the older man’s diaper.
“It came to me then: There isn’t going to be anyone to do this for me when I’m his age, and I needed to plan ahead,” said Sperry, now 61, recalling the experience several years ago.
Sperry never married, has no children and lives alone.
Like other “elder orphans” (older people without a spouse or children on whom they can depend) and “solo agers” (older adults without children, living alone), he’s expecting to move through later life without the safety net of a spouse, a son or a daughter who will step up to provide practical, physical and emotional support over time.
About 22 percent of older adults in the United States fall into this category or are at risk of doing so in the future, according to a 2016 study.
“This is an often overlooked, poorly understood group that needs more attention from the medical community,” said Maria Torroella Carney, the study’s lead author and chief of geriatric and palliative medicine at Northwell Health in New York. It’s also an especially vulnerable group, according to a recently released survey of 500 people who belong to the Elder Orphan Facebook Group, with 8,500 members.
Notably, 70 percent of survey respondents said they hadn’t identified a caregiver who would help if they became ill or disabled, while 35 percent said they didn’t have “friends or family to help them cope with life’s challenges.”
“What strikes me is how many of these elder orphans are woefully unprepared for aging,” said Carney, who reviewed the survey at my request.
Financial insecurity and health concerns are common among the survey respondents: a nonrandom sample consisting mostly of women in their 60s and 70s, most of them divorced or widowed and college-educated.
One-quarter of the group said they feared losing their housing; 23 percent reported not having enough money to meet basic needs at least once over the past year; 31 percent said they weren’t secure about their financial future. Some 40 percent of people admitted to depression; 37 percent to anxiety. More than half (52 percent) confessed to being lonely.
Carol Marak, 67, who runs the Facebook group, understands members’ insecurities better than ever since suffering an accident several weeks ago. She cut her finger badly on a meat grinder while making chicken salad for dinner guests. Divorced and childless, Marak lives alone in an apartment tower in Dallas. She walked down the hall and asked neighbors — a married couple — to take her to the emergency room.
“I freaked out — and this wasn’t even that big of a deal,” Marak said. “Imagine people like me who break a hip and have a long period of disability and recovery. What are they supposed to do?”
Sperry has thought a lot about who could be his caregiver down that road in a circumstance like that. No one fits the bill.
“It’s not like I don’t have family or friends: It’s just that the people who you can count on have to be specific types of family and friends,” he said. “Your sister or brother, they may be willing to help but not able to if they’re old themselves. Your nieces and nephews, they may be able, but they probably are not going to be willing.”
The solution Sperry thinks might work: moving to a continuing care retirement community with different levels of care when he begins to become less independent. That’s an expensive proposition – entry fees range from about $100,000 to $400,000 and monthly fees from about $2,000 to $4,000. Sperry, a longtime government employee, can afford it, but many people aging alone cannot.
Planning for challenges that can arise with advancing age is essential for people who go it alone, advised Sara Zeff Geber, a retirement coach and author of “Essential Retirement Planning for Solo Agers: A Retirement and Aging Roadmap for Single and Childless Adults.”
A good way to start is to think about things that adult children do for older parents and consider how you’re going to do all of that yourself or with outside assistance, she said.
In her book, Geber lists the responsibilities that adult children frequently take on: They serve as caregivers, help older parents figure out where to live, provide emotional and practical support, assist with financial issues such as managing money, and agree to serve as health-care or legal decision-makers when a parent becomes incapacitated.
