Did you see Michelle Singletary’s column this weekend in the Boston Globe? I like her column, The Color of Money. She writes in a straight-forward, honest manner, with guidance targeted at “regular folks” like myself.

This weekend she wrote about essentially being thrown into the deep end of the pool of elder care. If you read her column, you saw that her feelings, questions, fears, and sense of being overwhelmed and without direction are those very same feelings that most children of seniors (or healthier spouses of seniors) are experiencing every day.

While I can’t make your parent or spouse healthier, and I can’t bring back their memory skills, I can make it easier for you to handle your new caretaking role. The elder law attorney’s job has many aspects – for one, I help elders stretch out their assets to stay at home for as long as possible.

How do I do this? We look at MassHealth benefits and Veterans Benefits as a way of bringing more help into the home. We look at selling the home and building an in-law apartment on a child’s house. We explore setting up a contract between parent and child that allows the child to quit her job and care for her parent but still earn some income. And if nursing home is a possibility, we explore ways to maintain a healthy spouse at home and also explore various methods of safely and legally transferring some assets to children.

But the elder law attorney’s role goes beyond this – my job is also to pull in other professionals who can help you become a better – and more sane – caregiver. I may invite in an Alzheimer’s coach to teach a family how to work with a family member who is changing before their eyes; a geriatric nurse to guide a thoughtful conversation on wishes for end of life care; a geriatric care manager to create and manage a schedule of home health aides – and more.

I can’t get you out of the deep end of the pool. Life takes our parents and spouses in certain directions. But I can teach you how to swim.

Now she is playing Scrabble and other challenging games every day. And here is the “icing on the cake” - the director and her staff have done something we could never get my grandmother to do - she is practicing piano every day. She was a teacher and concert pianist for decades, but in the last 10 years or so, we’ve had to drag her to the piano. She’s inherently lazy and would rather just snooze. Not at Newbridge! Every day she works on her pieces, and the results are evident - her mind is sharper, she is more present, and she is happier. She told my uncle (her brother and confidant) that she couldn’t think of any reason to be unhappy here.

And then there are those painful hips. This weekend I witnessed some things I hadn’t seen in years. My grandmother came out to visit us, and she got herself up and out of the car by herself, with no complaints (highly unusual). Then she made it up the 12 steps to the porch, again without complaint (unheard of).  And the best part? Later that afternoon, she went back down those stairs and took a walk. Took a walk!  OK, it was just to the next house, but none of us could remember the last time she had been able to do that. The staff at Newbridge deserves all the credit.

As I dug into the trust, it turned out to be quite a doozy. It was poorly drafted. It was clearly put together by someone who didn’t understand the intersection of estate tax planning, Medicaid planning, property law, and fulfilling a mother’s wishes. It took me weeks of research, several pages of notes, and a lot of head-scratching to finally put together a 5-page letter to the client explaining her options for moving forward.

I often say that elder law and special needs planning involve juggling a lot of different balls and that we will never be able to get them all to land in a perfect line. It’s a matter of choosing which of the many issues are most important to you and letting the other ones slide into second place.

In this case, the clients and I reviewed the pros and cons of all of her options. Because of the poor drafting of the original trust, we were very limited in what we could do. If we did A, she would achieve B, but she would lose C. If we did B, we would achieve C, but lose A, and so on. The client weighed all the different things that she had hoped to accomplish and chose the one that was most important to her. And to accomplish that particular goal, the required action was to do nothing.

In the end, she walked out of my office with the same trust document she had when she came in - we didn’t change a thing. But she now has something else - knowledge. She now understands, much better than she did from the attorney who drafted the trust years ago - what will happen to her home if she wants to sell the house and move, what happens if she ever needs nursing home, and who in her family will inherit it after she passes away.

Sometimes, after examining all the angles, you realize that the best thing to do is to do nothing.

There will be blood pressure checks, immunizations, even yoga and reiki! They will also have a skin analyzer machine. There will be education on legal issues and general health matters, as well, and much more.

The event is open to the public - veterans of all ages and non-veterans alike. Refreshments and children’s activities, too!

Taking place at the Memorial Middle School on Saturday, March 13 from 10a - 2p. The school is on Nantasket Ave., behind the L Street playing fields - you can’t miss it.

I am still convinced that assisted living is the best place for her, and we are trying to work together with the staff to tweak her daily experience. Can they pull her and another one or two residents aside for Scrabble? Games of Hearts? Her vocabulary and math skills are quite impressive - let’s tap into those every day to keep her mind sharp, and, let’s face it, to keep her from being bored. Can she spend part of the day on the non-memory assisted living wing? Some of their programming is more engaging. And how about getting her to the gym or the pool for physical therapy for those painful arthritic hips? We are in the midst of these conversations with the Newbridge staff, and from the care and attention I have seen them give to each resident, I am sure that we will work out some new daily rhythms for her that she will like much better.

And there’s a lot to be said for having your best friend on campus! My grandmother’s best friend Bea lives in the independent living building. (Newbridge is a continuing care style campus.) Yesterday I took my 5 year old and we found a wheelchair (it would have been a very long walk for my grandmother with her walker and those pesky hips) and brought my grandmother to one of the campus restaurants for a long, leisurely, laughter-filled and hug-filled lunch with her wonderful pal and another woman from their old “supper club.” A group of about ten women used to go out every week to the “pancake house” (I think it was IHOP, but they all call it the pancake house). In recent years that group dwindled as driving became more difficult. But now several of those women are moving to Newbridge, and the supper club will rise again.

But her hips have awful arthritis and she’s been having more and more trouble getting herself up and down and walking around. We finally got to the point where we’ve become worried about her trying to get to the bathroom in the middle of the night. At the same time, we’ve become less enamored with her day program. And it’s just too difficult for her to navigate the stairs getting in and out of her apartment building every day. So we all - the whole family, including my grandmother - decided it was time for assisted living.

And what a place we found! She is in the memory program assisted living at Newbridge on the Charles. All I can say is WOW. The staff is incredible, so thoughtful and kind, and watching their residents so closely. I am beyond impressed. And the building! Well, it’s beautiful. And the food! Fresh and delicious.

Here is a hot tip - they had us arrive for move-in at 11:30, so the very first thing that happened was we were escorted to the dining room for lunch. Well, my grandmother could not have been happier! To sit in a lovely dining room, being waited on, eating scrumptious food - she kept looking at us, saying “I get to live here?!” And from there they swept her up into the day’s activities and Myrlene and I went to set up her room.

Her first day could not have been better! She didn’t ask for Myrlene and me at all that whole afternoon. We were worried about her going to bed alone and being confused by the new room, and maybe waking up in the morning and not knowing where she was, so Myrlene slept over with her. The report is that they kept her busy with activities until 8 pm and then she slept all night!

I am headed back over on Friday morning to visit with my two-and-a-half year old. I’ll be chronicling how my grandmother is doing and how the rest of us are adjusting to the change.  So far, things are looking great!

Bob Thomson, Lic. Ac., practices in Hingham. I know several people who swear by his skills. He is a great listener, and he really takes the time to think up the most appropriate treatment for each client. Lucky for us, he is conducting group sessions at our local senior centers. He has the group sit in comfortable chairs, and he applies treatments to the calfs and forearms - and from those locations, the acupuncture works its way to the rest of your body, to find the places that need the healing.

Afraid of needles? They don’t hurt. They shouldn’t call them needles, that word scares too many people. Although I admit that I close my eyes and don’t look at them for my entire session.

Here is where you can find Bob and begin your path towards feeling better:

Hanover Council on Aging: Friday 1/29 & Friday 2/5, both from 8:00 - 10:30 a.m. (Ongoing)

Hingham Department of Elder Services: Thursday  1/28 from 9:00 - 11:00 a.m. (Fourth Thursday of every month)

And if you aren’t quite ready for a treatment but would like to meet Bob and learn more about acupuncture, he will be presenting an introductory seminar at the Braintree Council on Aging on Thursday 2/18 from 10:30 - 11:30 a.m.

The fee is $25 per treatment, and the fifth session is free.

Spice up your winter and try something new!

So far the societal responses to these needs have been minimal. Take transportation - the Ride is, well, a long ride. The senior centers have vans, but you need to set up your appointment in advance, and their funding allows them to transport seniors only for certain types of activities. Poor transportation options as an elder or disabled person have been the flip-side to the choice of living the quiet life in the suburbs.

As for remaining at home for as long as possible, there is more help available here, and I help my clients access the resources available to them as best as possible. There is veteran’s funding, MassHealth money, and then good old fashioned creativity - like setting up a contract with a child that allows her to leave her job in order to care for her parents, yet be paid so that she can still meet her own obligations at home. Or, another example would be two or three elderly neighbors sharing the services of a personal shopper or a personal chef so that the grocery shopping and cooking is taken care of.

As a society, we expect to be taken care of in our old age, yet we encourage our children to cross the county in search of their dreams, so we don’t have a built-in support system. And we don’t like to pay taxes. So who will care for the Boomers? I think the coming decades will see a blossoming of the American “creative spirit” - neighbors banding together to develop shared living arrangements, new businesses developing to serve seniors at home at prices they can afford. And in the mean time, each aging Boomer should be saving up funds for what they hope will be a long retirement. Meeting with a trusted financial advisor would be a very good first step.

For anyone who will need MassHealth to pay for nursing home care, it is usually a good idea to try to set aside some funds to serve as a cushion to provide those necessary items that MassHealth won’t cover. For single elders,  the way to set aside a reserve fund is usually to deposit some amount of money with a “pooled trust.” A pooled trust is a trust fund, operated by a nonprofit organization, that pools together the deposits of its many elder and disabled members in order to streamline costs and maximize interest earned. The staff at the pooled trust keeps a separate running balance of each individual’s deposits. We have four pooled trusts in Massachusetts.

Until now, MassHealth has allowed elders to set aside some funds in a pooled trust to serve as a cushion for those uncovered “extras” that will inevitably be needed during a nursing home stay. MassHealth has permitted this transfer without imposing the usual transfer penalty.

But we just learned that this month, MassHealth plans to close this door and will no longer allow elders to set aside reserve funds in this manner. Therefore, if you are an elder or are caring for an elder who you think will need MassHealth nursing home care soon - whether that be in the next few months or the next year - you should speak with an elder law attorney this week about setting up a pooled trust account. In order to preserve a cushion to sustain a person through a nursing home stay, all of the paperwork for enrolling in the pooled trust must be completed before MassHealth changes the regulation, and they intend to make the change some time this month.

If someone you love will need MassHealth to pay for nursing home care soon, and they would like to set aside a reserve fund to pay for those items and services that MassHealth doesn’t cover, then you need to speak with an elder law attorney now. Time is of the essence.