You didn’t plan on this. Nobody plans on this. Come in anyway.
We’ve cried in the hospital parking lot, the good bathroom on the third floor, and once, memorably, at a Walgreens. Then we started writing things down. Advocate With Love is education for family caregivers and elders, from two people who have already done it. And. We’re funny.
The road
Everybody is on the same road.
Eight stretches. People arrive in the middle and stand in two of them at once, so there is no wrong place to come in. Find the stretch you’re standing in, and the thing you need is the thing we put there.
- 0
Before the Call
“Nothing's wrong yet and I want to keep it that way.”
Guide coming - 1
The Call
“Something just happened and I can't think.”
- 2
The Hospital Weeks
“They're asking about months, I'm still on hours.”
- 3
The Money Maze
“There's a rule everybody knows except me.”
- 4
The Paperwork
“I don't know what exists or where it is.”
The free guide, ready now - 5
The Family
“I'm alone in this and everyone has opinions.”
- 6
The Long Middle
“This is my life now and nobody sees it.”
Two guides coming - 7
After
“It's over and there's still paperwork.”
Start here. It’s free.
Choosing an Elder Law Attorney
Ten questions to ask
because nobody signposts when you need a lawyer
The stretch when the paperwork problem leaves the kitchen table
Much of what people call “Elder Care” (and we call “Advocating with Love,” or giving it your AWL) is logistics, phone calls, and forms you can absolutely handle. But what about the other documents that hospitals, banks, and Medicaid offices request? They need an actual human attorney, one who does this work every day, and, SERIOUSLY: choosing that attorney is a project of its own.
“Most families choose their lawyer mid-crisis: Somebody is in a hospital bed, somebody typed “elder law attorney near me” into a phone in the cafeteria, and everybody was grateful that somebody, anybody, picked up.”
A consultation is an interview, and it runs both ways. The attorney is evaluating your situation while you are figuring out whether this person is affordable, reliable, and reachable. The ten questions below can help to settle whether or not they are a good fit.
- 1“Is Elder Law, specifically, your specialty?”
- 2“Are you certified as a specialist?”
- 3“Have you handled situations like ours, specifically?”
- 4“How do you charge, and what exactly does that cover?”
- 5“What documents would you recommend for us, and why each one?”
- 6“How will these documents hold up when we need to use them?”
- 7“If a parent already has memory problems, what options do we have?”
- 8“Who in your office will we be working with day-to-day?”
- 9“What should we bring, and what should we do before our documents are signed?”
- 10“What happens after the documents are signed?”
The whole guide, with the reasons behind each question
Every question comes with what a good answer sounds like, what a bad one sounds like, and the glove box tips. Print it and fill it in with a pen, or fill it in on your device: tap a box, hit the mic key on your keyboard, and it’ll transcribe.
Oh and by the way, we gotta tell you this: we are educators and fellow former caregivers, not attorneys, and nothing in this article is legal advice. It is a map of the questions. The attorney you choose supplies the answers, for your state and your family, and that is the reason to choose a good one.
What’s coming
The next three.
Same format, same price, which is nothing. They come to you as they land.
- How to hire a home health aide, including what the job titles actually mean and what each one is allowed to do.
- The conversation you're avoiding, with the exact words to open it.
- Things nobody tells you you're allowed to feel.
Send me the guides
One email per guide. No texts, because nobody in hour forty of a hospital stay wants their phone to buzz.
We don’t sell your address. We’re not big enough to have anyone to sell it to, and we wouldn’t anyway.
The community
Come sit down.
There’s a room where people are doing this right now. It’s free. It’s small and it’s new, and somebody in there knows which case manager actually answers.
You can read everything and post nothing, and that still counts as being in it. Nobody in hour forty of a hospital stay wants to make friends.
Come sit with usWho’s talking
Two friends, a few chapters ahead.
For more than ten years we were Standardized Patients, which means we were paid to fake symptoms at medical students and grade whether they treated us like a human being or a science project. We are trained professionals in communication. Then our own families needed us, and we found out what the other side of the bed rail is like.
We’re winding down our executorships now, which is its own era of stress, and building the thing we would have killed for at the time.
The system is the problem
Eldercare is broken. Mostly not the people in it, the thing itself. So your struggles are not you being bad at this.
Doctors are on this ride too
She has forty patients today, a board counting her keystrokes, and about eleven minutes to be a person in. We'll show you where the give is in those eleven minutes.
The free route gets named first
Every time. If there's a way to do this without paying anybody, that way goes at the top of the page.
We aren't experts in anything
Not lawyers, not doctors. We're a few chapters ahead of you, and we learned it the very hard way.