Sharing Caring

“The family is one of nature’s masterpieces.” George Santayana

I spent a couple of decades sharing the caregiver role for my mother with my sister, Sally.  Among other things, Mom had advanced Parkinson’s Disease.

It was a tough slog. 

Although I loved her dearly, my relationship with my mother was never easy. I did not fare much better with my sister, who is twelve years older. Although our personalities were very much alike, we were polar opposites in almost every other way. She was a conservative, I am not; she was very religious, I am not; she had lots of money, I wish I did; she ran a tight ship in all she did, while my organizational skills could best be described as chaotic. And so on.

 Despite these differences, we had a lot of fun together for a lot of years. Sally could actually be quite funny. When she was in her forties we started calling ourselves the “sparkle plenties” to let all our serious family members know we were good for some laughs

By the 1980s my sister and her husband had single-handedly built his law practice into the go-to firm for Palm Beach’s “Ds and Ds,” the divorcing and/or dying caviar-and-champagne crowd. My career as a social policy analyst and writer was just getting started. In other words, there was a huge distance in our economic statuses at that time.

That spring I spent a couple of weeks in Florida working to take charge of my mother’s future. She could no longer take care of herself and she could not live alone. Finding the right “home”  resulted in a tussle that prevailed until the end.

Mom first moved into a high-end independent living apartment in Florida near my sister’s home. My sister had an interior decorator plan the layout including where to put the antique silver set. I mentioned to my mother that it was a risky decision to keep her precious silver there because this type of residence often has high rates of theft.

She cried and cried.

“Then why do you insist I live there?”

My mother had the remarkable ability to make very large tears. I never figured out how she did it.

They were at least three times the size of most people’s tears. They would roll slowly down her cheeks one by one. A few minutes of my mother’s tears and she almost always got her way.

However, she was not going to get it this time. We had sold her home and she had nowhere else to go.

Perhaps it was guilt over this fact that drove my sister to install an expensive custom alarm and automatic shutter system in the windows of her 2 bedroom unit so mom would feel safe if there were hurricanes.

My mother had substantial funds but she was not super wealthy.  Because my sister lived in Florida near my mother she volunteered to take charge of my Mom’s finances, which made sense to me at the time.

A few months later I got a call from Sally saying that she had just returned from visiting a friend in Ohio whose mother’s assisted living apartment was “much nicer and larger than our mother’s" so she rented a 3-bedroom apartment in the same facility” which was twice the price of her present one. She was busy decorating it. The new top-of-the-line alarm and shutter system had already been installed.

 This was the first of many sneaky transgressions involving my sister’s spending of my mother’s money. For example, huge donations were made from my mother’s bank account to my sister’s church, an organization of which my mother had heartily disapproved.

For the rest of my mother’s life, I seethed and pouted about my sister’s spending, but it did me absolutely no good.

A couple of million dollars and five years later, I had little guilt when the long-term care center moved my very private mother to a crowded Medicaid room where she stayed until her death. I had the luxury of knowing it hadn’t been my decision to spend beyond her last breath.

My sister’s and my final conflict was over funeral arrangements. I had softened by then. It just wasn’t worth it to continue the grudge. In fact, it was feeling downright childish.

The truth is I loved my sister and wanted to have a relationship with her. I will always be appalled at what transpired when she had free rein of my mother’s checkbook. But I couldn’t have a relationship with her and hold onto that image at the same time. I finally let go.

When the time came to gather together to honor my mother, my sister and I held hands. We hugged. We sang hymns. We cried our ordinary-sized tears. “How did she do that?” my sister said. I shrugged. We’ll never know.

For more information about family caregiving:

Mercera, A. M. (2022, May 19). How I Stopped Resenting My Siblings as a Family Caregiver. AgingCare. Retrieved March 23, 2023.

American Medical Association. (2018). Caring for the Caregivers: A Guide for Physicians [PDF].

Russo, F. R. (2022, May 19). Caregiving with Your Siblings. Family Caregiver Alliance. Retrieved March 23, 2023.

Thumbnail Picture: Water Color by Betsy Vierck.