(Dis)Organization and Motivations

Your parent's secret agenda probably isn't "add endless tasks to my child's to-do list."

After my dad stopped driving, he allowed his insurance to lapse and traded in his driver’s license for an ID card. The state mandated that we also cough up his license plate, as it wasn’t legal to have a car with a license plate that wasn’t insured or registered, so I unceremoniously dropped it off for him at the DMV one Friday afternoon and signed it over to the government.

For months, the red Cadillac sat in its parking spot. The air leaked out of the tires, puddling them on the pavement. Dust and pollen covered the exterior, giving the car a greenish-yellow filter. And when I tried to start it, it laughed at me in little clicks.

My dad nagged me about it for months. Asked me what I wanted to do with it. Told me we might get $750 for it. Every time I drove him to a doctor’s appointment in my blue Prius, he said, “We have got to do something about that car.” I’d sigh or explain in exasperated tones that it would be a lot of work for me to sell it. I’d have to put air in the tires. Get AAA to jumpstart it. Drive it around to keep the battery alive. Take photos of it. Post them. Handle calls and visits and test-drives. I didn’t even know where the title was. Sometimes I explained all this calmly, but often I snapped at him, emphasizing that this was a burden and I had more important things to do.

Finally, the condo association sent him a notice—it was against the rules to have a car in the parking lot without a license plate, without a registration, and for each day he let it sit out there, they’d levy a fine. He took this as another opportunity to nag me about getting rid of it. “Can’t you call somebody and explain the situation?” I asked. “Tell them your daughter is taking care of it.”

I didn’t want to mess with individual buyers, so I found a “we buy everything” auto trader group online. They offered to buy the 1991 Cadillac for the absolute minimum that they buy cars for—$235. “This is so not worth it,” I thought.

The next step was to find the title. I asked my dad if he knew where it was, and he assured me he did. A couple weeks later, he called to confess he couldn’t find it.

“I feel like it’s in the briefcase,” I said. “Did you look in the briefcase where the other papers are?”

“No, it wouldn’t be in there,” he said.

The next time I came over to take out the trash, I looked for the hard, rectangular brown leather briefcase and found it on the far side of my dad’s bed, on the floor, under the nightstand. When I was a little kid, he carried it to his office each day. When he retired, it held questionable VHS movies. Now, it held his will, his power of attorney, some documents related to the condo, and, I guessed, the title to the car. The code to the combination lock has always been “000.”

“Could you just humor me and go through this and see if you can find the title?” I asked, tossing the briefcase roughly to the side of his recliner. “I have a feeling it’s in there.”

I had to postpone the sale of the car until we could locate the title. Weeks passed.

Finally, he called me: “Guess what I found in the briefcase?”

I reopened the sale and arranged for the auto trader group to pick up the car. The tow truck that pulled up to the condo said in big letters ALL AUTO HUSTLERS. Neighbors stared. One woman even took a picture of the tow truck with her phone, probably guessing someone was getting their car repossessed and looking forward to gossiping about their misfortune.

The tow truck driver wore a dingy sleeveless t-shirt. His skin was that leathery tan that comes from spending hours outside in Florida every day for years. He smelled like salt. He squinted at me through the sweat beads dropping from his forehead into his eyes.

“You got your title?” he asked.

I handed it over.

“He signed it as both buyer and seller,” the tow truck guy chuckled. “He sellin’ it to his self?”

“He’s elderly, I’m sorry, I should have explained it better to him,” I said.

“Naw, no worries,” he said. “Happens all the time. Are the tires inflated?”

I shook my head.

“Does it start?”

“It did,” I said. “I think the battery’s just dead if you want to jump it?”

“It’s alright,” he said. “You got anything in there you need to get out before I push it up on the truck?”

I opened the big red car door to check. All my dad’s registrations and insurance cards, dating back at least 10 years, lay on the floor like confetti after an exceptionally boring party. Was I supposed to take those? I shoved them in my purse. I saw my old GPS on the floor of the backseat. My dad, worried I’d get lost driving around without him, had bought it for me a decade or so earlier. It was a TomTom, and I had downloaded Snoop Dogg’s voice for it. When I was supposed to make a left, it’d say “Turn left, nephew,” and when we arrived at our destination: “Thank you, thank you, I’ve had the ride of my life.”

I watched from the condo balcony as the tow truck driver loaded the Daddy Caddy onto the truck, and I waited for relief to wash over me, but I just felt sad. He really would never drive again. I would never drive his car again. He’d have to keep squeezing into my Prius.

All Auto Hustlers wrote out a check to my dad for $235. He had fallen asleep, so I put the check on the table next to his recliner. I called later that night.

“What do you want to do with the check?” I asked, bracing myself for another tiny, annoying task I’d have to add to my list of tiny, annoying tasks.

“I’m going to sign it over to you,” he said. “It’s yours. I should have given you more for your wedding, but I didn’t have a lot of notice, so this is it.”

I felt like the most spoiled brat. Here I thought all this running around, searching for paperwork, hitting my head against the wall of his intransigence, was just him making my life more difficult. But all along it was so he could feel like he gave me something for my wedding.

Sometimes, it’s going to feel like your parent is deliberately making your life more difficult. Often, they just have motivations and limitations of which you’re unaware.

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Taking Stock of Your Parent’s (Dis)Organization

Finding the title to my dad’s car led me to take stock of where other things were: his will, his insurance documents. When I was suddenly put in charge of most of his records and finances and health care decisions, it helped that I had been watching him deal with his affairs in various ways for years. I usually knew when to look in the briefcase, when to search through his email, and when to pull out the file boxes from the closet.

A mistake I made was not seeing that my dad’s disorganization would become my problem. Why had I waited until the condo board was literally charging us to sell the car? Why were outdated documents everywhere, distracting me from what was actually needed? Why did I stand by for decades watching him write passwords on scraps of paper?

If you aren’t observing your parent’s organizational systems, and it’s suddenly your job to manage them, you might miss doctor’s appointments, fail to pay a bill, get charged for something unnecessarily, or simply waste time looking for things when you don’t have time to spare. You might not know that the keys to everything are in a locked briefcase or that all the passwords are written haphazardly on both sides of a file folder.

Here are some things you may need to work with your parent to keep track of:

• Finances (bills, pensions, payments, etc.)

• Doctor’s appointments

• Doctor’s instructions

• Medications

• Legal documents

• Insurance paperwork

• Home repairs and maintenance

• Computer, tablet, phone, and app data and passwords

• End-of-life wishes (will, living will, funeral arrangements, etc.)

Your parent probably has a system (or perhaps nine systems) for keeping these things straight. The first step is to observe or ask what their system is and to write this down. Maybe a Google doc or Note? (Remember, you’re taking other notes, too!) You’re going to think it’s overkill to write it down, I know. But when you have to make a quick decision, perhaps when you’re anxious or stressed, you’ll be glad you made this list.

Here are the organizational “systems” my dad had:

• Finances

  • Folder in a locked briefcase, banking website, checkbook on the table by the door, miscellaneous credit card websites and statements in a stack on the desk

• Doctor’s appointments

  • Calendar on the fridge, scraps of paper on the side table and desk

• Doctor’s instructions

  • Pages of discharge instruction printouts, notes in legal pad

• Medications

  • Bathroom cabinet, bathroom counter, kitchen table, table near recliner, breadbox, list that came with the medications

• Legal documents

  • Locked briefcase

• Insurance paperwork

  • Locked briefcase

• Home repairs and maintenance

  • Folder in cabinet near computer, business cards on desk, email

• Passwords

  • Saved in Google Chrome, written on sticky notes

• End-of-life wishes

  • Some documents in the briefcase, some on file with an attorney, no funeral plans

When you ask how your parent organizes their lives, it’s possible they will feel threatened. If you have a trusting relationship with them, it probably won’t be terribly awkward, but if you’re starting from a more complicated place, it might feel to them like you are doubting their ability to stay organized or that you are taking over as a manager of their lives. Approach these topics with care, but don’t avoid them altogether. With all things related to your parent, if you avoid asking for their help or input, you’ll likely end up doing it eventually without their help or input.

Here are a few simple scripts for asking about organizational strategies:

“Dad, driving through the neighborhood, I saw that that house on 17th Avenue burned down. That’s so scary. It made me wonder, do you keep legal documents and stuff like that in a fireproof safe? A safe deposit box?”

“Mom, I’m trying to get more organized. What’s your system for keeping stuff straight like insurance, legal documents, stuff like that?”

“Mom, I started reading this newsletter about the logistics of aging and how adult children can help their parents as they get older. One of the suggestions is to find out how your parents organize their documents and finances and whatnot. Can we set aside some time and you can walk me through how you stay organized?”

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Here are some things you can start doing right now:

• Be sure you know all your parent’s identifying information: birthdate, birthplace, Social Security number.

• Review password management. I set up my dad with a LastPass account for a few reasons—he wouldn’t have to remember passwords anymore, we could both easily access all his accounts, and no passwords would be written on sticky notes for anyone to find. If a password manager isn’t appropriate for your situation, encourage your parent to have some sort of system. That might mean using the same password formula for every website or keeping a physical notebook with passwords written neatly with the date on which they were changed.

• Create a central place for key documents. Eventually, I began to keep all my dad’s documents (a copy of his ID, his Social Security benefits letter, his bank statements, our Power of Attorney, etc.) in a Dropbox folder, which made attaching things easy when I needed to contact a bank or send a document to his insurance coordinator.

• Create a shared calendar. If you do a lot of chauffeuring for your parent, it might help to have a dedicated digital calendar for their appointments that you can integrate into your own calendar so nothing gets missed. This will also help if you need to refer to past appointments. When did we switch urologists? How long did the podiatrist say you should go between appointments?

And if you want to earn extra gold stars:

• Locate your parent’s Social Security benefit letter.

• Identify a central place for all doctor’s instructions and medication lists. Maybe this is a three-ring binder you maintain, or maybe it’s a running Google doc you access from your phone. My dad used a pharmacy that provided a printed list each month with all his refills, but he managed appointments by writing them on scraps of paper strewn about the apartment.

• There are also some products that can help you get your parent organized. Savor sells a “family emergency binder” with dedicated spots for your passport, birth certificate, home deed, etc. You don’t have to spend $70ish to get organized, but if you were a Type A kid who loved school supply shopping, this might appeal to you. There are also new apps all the time to help you track your parents’ meds, symptoms, and appointments, and to share with other caregivers.

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One last cautionary note!

It’s tempting, as someone who uses their phone for everything, to move all your parents’ bills and records to the cloud. And maybe you should! The more online things are, though, the less transparent they will be to your parent (who I’m assuming is less online than you are). It’s a good idea to think of how everything looks to them, and how you can make the management of their lives easier for everyone, not just more convenient for you. If you don’t talk to them about why you’re doing things, or if they can’t see your motivations, they may not see a streamlined system for organization, they may see only their own loss of independence and autonomy. “Everything is online!” seems convenient to me, but “Everything is online!” to a person who is not comfortable with apps or the cloud looks a lot like “Everything is hidden.”

And, if they aren’t clear on your motivations, they might suspect you’re just making things more difficult.