Years Later, Divorce Complicates Caregiving
My friend Diane Fener, an attorney in Virginia Beach, Va., maintains a busy schedule when she travels to New England to see her parents.
“I make the circuit,” she said. She visits her mother, who for two years has lived in the dementia unit of an assisted living facility in Rhode Island. She visits her father in his apartment about a half-hour away in Massachusetts. And his second wife, Ms. Fener’s stepmother, in a nearby nursing home; she, too, has dementia. And the man who was her mother’s second husband for nearly 20 years.
“Four stops,” Ms. Fener said. “I don’t get as much time with each of them as I’d like.”
--
Years after parents split, their children may wind up helping to sustain two households instead of one, and those households can be across town or across the country. Further, unmarried women (whether single, widowed or divorced) face significantly higher poverty rates in middle and old age, according to a study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (PDF) that AARP published last year.
Diane Fener and her sister and brothers each contribute money to support their mother and father. “I don’t resent any of it,” she said, “but if they hadn’t gotten divorced, their budgets wouldn’t be as strained.” Neither would their offspring’s.