At the end of October, I traveled to Tucson, Arizona to visit and help my ailing parents. It was quite a trip, both literally and in the “trippy” sense of the word. I am still trying to organize the experiences in my mind.

Because of my multiple myeloma, these experiences hold lessons for me that are more immediate than they are for the average Joe. Most of the lessons, I feel, are relevant to other multiple myeloma patients and care­givers as well, so I thought I would share them in this column.

My dad has both terminal cancer and very late-stage multiple scle­ro­sis. He is almost bedridden and totally dependent on my mother, who is his primary caregiver.

When I arrived in Tucson, I found my aunt (mom’s sister) living at my parents’ two-bedroom townhouse be­cause she too had become too sick and confused to be able to live alone. On top of that, my mother was suffering from a bad case of the flu and her own severe arthritis to the point that she had trouble getting out of bed. They had a nurse coming by for a few hours each day, but other than that, my mom was trying to do it all. Feeding, cleaning, toileting, and medicating all three of them was overwhelming.

Lesson For Me: Don’t wait too long to get caregiver help when you need it.

To say that the house was troubled was a huge understatement.

My aunt had recently come home from the hospital after battling a liver ailment, only to suffer a fall two days later. It was then that my mom brought her to their home to keep an eye on her. When I arrived, my aunt was weak, slightly confused, skipping medications, and dehydrated. She agreed that she wasn’t comfortable staying alone at this point, but didn’t know what to do about it.

She felt completely at the mercy of her insurance company, which was denying her coverage to enter a reha­bil­i­ta­tion facility. She wasn’t communicating clearly with them or her doctor, so she felt very trapped. She was contemplating going to a nursing home that Medicare would cover, but she hated both the specific facility they would cover and the general idea of any full service nursing home. Having visited the depressing facility, I couldn’t blame her one bit.

Lesson For Me: Don’t count on health insurance or the government to pay for long-term care if you don’t absolutely have to.

My aunt, while not wealthy, owned her own condo and had a modest amount of money saved up. Once I made that discovery, I was able to find a couple of nice, affordable assisted living communities nearby that had immediate availability and that would be able to give her the appropriate amount of physical assistance that she required. Since she had nobody other than my overwhelmed mother to care for her, these facilities were attractive options.

The facility we chose provided a private one-bedroom apartment, two meals a day, care checks every two to four hours, medication management (something that my aunt desperately needed), transportation to shop­ping and doctors, cleaning, shower assistance, physical therapy, and medical assistance from on-site nurses 24 hours a day. Perfect!

Because my aunt had spent a lifetime living very independently and saving her pennies in order to get what she had, she didn’t really consider these types of assisted living facilities an option. She didn’t want to spend the money.

Lesson For Me: You can’t take it with you! Spend what you need; it’s yours.

I explained to her that with her small retirement income and social security paying her for the remainder of her years, she could afford to stay at this facility for as long as 15 years without selling her condo, and at least another 15 years if she did sell it. Since she was 74 years old, this arrangement seemed like a pretty good bet. She agreed that she couldn’t stay at my parents’ and so would give the facility a try – at least until she felt better.

She moved into her new assisted living apartment exactly one week after I arrived. While she was under­stand­ably unsettled at first, she seemed to be adapting to her new home pretty quickly.

Unfortunately, she never got a chance to get used to it. The day after she moved in, she began to bleed internally and was taken to the hospital, where she passed away less than 24 hours later.

Lesson For Me: No matter how much you think you know how it is all going to end, you have no idea how or when you are actually going to die.

While my aunt had many medical issues that she was dealing with, none of them seemed to be acute enough to cause imminent death.

The death was a huge shock for my mother, who lost her only remaining sibling and her closest lifelong friend. For me, I can’t feel anything but relief for my aunt. She had become a miserable lonely woman who had shut out everybody from her life other than my family. She spent her final years alone in her small apartment, only rarely willing to think about anybody or anything beyond her own illnesses and problems.

Lesson For Me: Show your friends and family how much you love them through your actions and your words. Don’t do it for them. Do it for yourself.

If my aunt had only been able to reciprocate my mother’s love for her, she would have been able to enjoy her final years instead of merely enduring them. My mother longed for her sister to be somebody she could do something with on the rare occasions she could get respite from taking care of my father.

My aunt lived in a community in Tucson with a wealth of opportunities for the elderly. Had she moved to the assisted living facility while healthier, she may have been able to make friends among the many friendly folks there who were in relatively the same position in life. Waiting until she was too sick to enjoy it denied her this possibility.

Too often we choose to focus on the problems of our lives. We see what we have lost instead of all that we have. For my dear Aunt Judy, this attitude robbed her of her golden years.

Lesson For Me: I will make every effort not to let my golden years slip away.

Aloha and carpe diem!