By Beth Pinsker
'My brother doesn't even call to ask about our mother': The eldercare burden is often compounded by difficult relationships between brothers and sisters.
Ruth's dad died two years ago, and since then, she has had the primary legal, medical and financial responsibility for her mom, who just turned 82 and has been living with cognitive decline at an assisted-living facility. That would be hard enough, but according to Ruth, her two brothers have made the situation worse.
Not only do they not help with logistics or emotional support, she said, but they push her to the limit, to the point where she sometimes feels in danger from them. (MarketWatch is using an alias because she does not want to be identified.) They have called adult protective services repeatedly, claiming that their mom is being mistreated, court documents show, and have tried to monitor her own whereabouts, Ruth said. Because of the suspicions aroused by the complaints, she said, she lost a job. The siblings tangled for years in litigation over control of their parents' house, court documents show. When the house was finally sold, the brothers took a share of the proceeds, even though that money was needed to provide care for their mom, Ruth said.
Ruth's mother told her that when she dies, her wishes are to have her ashes mixed with her husband's and spread at one of their favorite places. Ruth said her brothers are objecting and have threatened to sue Ruth over their potential inheritance and custody of the remains. The brothers remain concerned about the situation regarding their mother's finances, court documents show.
"It's been a 51/2-year-long process of total chaos," said Ruth, who is in her 50s.
On the spectrum of sibling conflicts over caregiving and inheritances, Ruth's situation is extreme, but unfortunately, it's not rare. Siblings end up in court regularly over both big and little issues concerning eldercare, because there's often no other way to handle disputes if the parents lack the emotional or the mental capacity to make decisions. The exact number of cases may never even be known, because family disputes are administered via county-level probate courts and there's no national tracking of these cases.
Even if the fights don't end up in front of a judge, that doesn't mean they don't take a physical, emotional and financial toll. Instead of a caregiving crisis bringing families together out of shared love for an ailing parent, it's tearing many of them apart. Some people shut down, while others become controlling. There's a lot of regression to childhood roles, but now there's no parent available to impose order. These battles are often fought in ways that remain unseen by most. And as the oldest baby boomers turn 80, an age when health issues tend to become more complex, family squabbles over eldercare will likely increase, experts say.
"Families don't talk about this, and it can be crippling," said Megan Slatter, a wealth manager based in Utah. She has dealt with many of these disputes among her clients, who tend to have large families, and many of the conflicts result in siblings not talking to one another. Some end up in court, with money going to lawyers and situations not always getting resolved because funds to fight the battle run out.
Ruth said she feels like she's going to end up in this kind of situation. MarketWatch examined legal documents filed in state probate court that detailed her family's battle. She said she has attempted to connect with her brothers but was rebuffed. She has analyzed her options. Her lawyer recommended she offer her brothers a settlement from the funds that her mother has left in order to get them to go away, but so far that hasn't worked.
"It's never enough," she said. Her plan is to keep spending on her mother's care, at the rate of about $15,000 a month, and get the potential inheritance pot down to zero. After that, she hopes to walk away. "When mom is gone, I can be done," Ruth said. "I'm good with not having any related family. I'm just waiting for that time to come."
Uneven caregiving duties
The practical issue siblings face is that caregiving duties invariably fall on them unevenly. More men than ever are taking care of their elders, and as the massive baby boomer generation gets older, everyone will have to chip in. But women still do the majority of the work - 55% of caregivers in the U.S. are women, according to data released last year by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Most caregivers are in their 50s, have their own children and are also working, according to AARP's annual caregiving survey. With little community support available, they are struggling and, often, resentful of anyone in their orbit who they think is contributing less.
Gray Monster, a newsletter aimed at caregivers, plays off this dynamic with its slogan: "Gray Monster helps because we know your brother won't." Founder Kim Elliott ran the line by her own brother for approval before using it. She didn't intend to call him out specifically or to be gender-specific, but she wanted to tap into the feeling she was hearing about from readers. "It's an experience that a lot of caregivers have where it tends to fall on one sibling's shoulders. I wish it didn't resonate the way it does," she said at her company's first in-person conference in Brooklyn in April.
Gray Monster allowed MarketWatch to poll its readers about the split in sibling caregiving responsibilities. The most common response, given by nearly half of the 125 respondents, was to give themselves a 10 for involvement and their sibling a 1.
"My brother doesn't even call to ask about our mother because it gives him anxiety. She's only 68. I'm 40, with a full-time job and 2 kids in middle school," said one.
"I am a full-time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week caregiver with no help. There are no conflicts with my two siblings because I learned many years ago it was pointless to even suggest they assist," said another.
This is a selective audience of caregivers who are interested enough to sign up for a newsletter, so perhaps it's not surprising that only five gave themselves a low rating, and just a handful gave higher marks to a sibling than to themselves. One caregiver who was hard on their own care performance said, "It would be better if we had clearer or more defined roles."
The fight over who does more definitely got in the way of the relationship between Nicole Smith and Kyrsten Johnson, sisters who have been dealing with their divorced mom's dementia-related diagnosis since 2017 - although they have been coping with her general caregiving needs for much longer. The stress of the situation drove the sisters apart, and they stopped talking for several years.
Smith, 59, is an advocate for caregivers who wrote a book about her experiences caring for her mother, who is now 81, titled "Diagnosis: Dementia." In it, she wrote about some of the problems she had dealing with her sister. Smith's side of the story is that she felt like her sister abandoned her caregiving duties when the situation became difficult. That left Smith to struggle with managing the situation from afar, since she lived in New Jersey, while her mother and Johnson, now 57, lived near each other in California. This was especially hard during the pandemic, and it eventually involved a series of cross-country moves.
"When mom needed help, my sister said, 'Well, you do it.' I said, 'Mom helped you raise your boys after your divorce, and now you're abandoning her in her time of need. That's just shitty,'" Smith said. "Where the resentment came in was, she said, 'I'm not doing it, but you're doing it wrong.' So I said, 'If you're not going to do it, you have to back off."
Johnson, not surprisingly, has a different view of what happened. "I took care of mom for 20 years before her dementia started," she said, delving into some of the long history of their mother's manic-depressive behavior. "When mom started to get worse, I was working at a cancer hospital about 80 hours a week. Then there was COVID. I did all this stuff, and then she showed up when mom was getting worse and had a meltdown."
Smith first moved her mother closer to her on the East Coast, and then, when her family decided to move to Arizona, her mom moved along with them, this time to the memory-care facility where she still lives.
After Johnson read her sister's book and saw more of her point of view, a thaw started. Johnson said, "Taking care of mom and then turning it into a podcast and books - I'm so happy for her. She's really doing stuff and helping other people, instead of remembering all the bad stuff."
Now they see each other regularly for family events and talk. "We are good," Smith said. Johnson added, "My advice to people is that if you want to get along, just move on. That's what we did."
The psychology of estrangement
Siblings usually don't get into these kinds of huge fights on their own. Many conflicts over caregiving are rooted in childhood, often because of the behavior and actions of parents, experts say. It's never just about who is doing more grocery runs while mom is home in hospice care.
"In an alienated sibling relationship, it's usually been abusive for so long that there's no trust," said Joshua Marsden, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Colorado State University who is studying sibling and parental alienation. So when they have to suddenly work together, they are always suspicious of each other. Does the sibling now suddenly want to be friends, or do they want something? "It spirals from there," Marsden said.
The happy-ending stories that Marsden has observed mostly occurred in a clinical setting. The rapprochement usually starts out small, maybe with a text message here or there or small talk at a family event. One dynamic he sees often is that a controlling parent - or both parents - turned one sibling against the other long ago. If the parent alienator is incapacitated or dies, the sibling who was aligning with the parent can start to feel differently. "You start to question your own beliefs, and you might slowly start to reintegrate," Marsden said.
'It's an experience that a lot of caregivers have, where it tends to fall on one sibling's shoulders.' Kim Elliott, founder, Gray Monster
Bill Eddy, a longtime conflict resolution specialist, also describes relationship dynamics between siblings that can be similar to a divorcing couple trying to make it work for the kids. He points to the fact that people are generally stuck with their siblings and can't legally cut them out of their parents' lives or their own. They just have to try to make the best of it, he said.
While most of Eddy's work is focused on acrimonious couples, he is getting an increasing number of requests to apply the principles of high-conflict divorce to families dealing with eldercare. Usually, the one reaching out for help is the sibling tasked with holding power of attorney or serving as executor of an estate, and who is being hectored by a troublesome sibling.
"They are in position to make decisions, but then also get all the blame," said Eddy. He suggests not cutting anyone off, but instead setting limits on the kind of contact that's appropriate, as well as the frequency. "A hundred emails a day is a bit much - and there are cases where that happened. The angry one is contacting other people in the family and saying that the estate executor isn't telling them anything. That might not be at all true, but they feel that," he said.
This is all the domain of the reasonable, however, and it takes some effort, Eddy said. But then again, he added, if you're the reasonable one, you likely will want to do the right thing - to reach out, show empathy and respect for the other person, and try to resolve the situation. "Keep your responses brief, stick to information, be friendly and firm. Try to answer in a way that doesn't escalate conflict," he said. If it all still seems too hard, a mediator can help.
"Maybe an uncle can help talk things through, or a therapist," Eddy said. "It's worth trying to reconnect. A lot of times what bothered people 30 years ago isn't really operative anymore. And so if you are the reasonable person, and you're executor or trustee or power of attorney, use what influence you have to try to reconnect in a friendly way. You may get a better response now."
Intractable disputes
Author Fern Schumer Chapman and her mother giving a school presentation about the Holocaust.
When a parent nears the end of their life, issues like costs for care and splitting inheritances can arise, and family fights about money can get even more intense. A survey conducted by credit-card review website Cardrates found that 58% of adults said they'd have to borrow to pay for a funeral. An issue like that can intensify the squabbling when a death occurs in the family.
Erica Sandberg, a consumer advocate for Cardrates, said she can already see this sort of thing brewing in her own family. She's the estate executor for her mother, and she has six siblings. Her mother has a will, but her own funeral is not something she's willing to discuss.
"Not all of my siblings are in the same financial position, and it really gets complicated and emotional, and full of arguments sometimes," Sandberg said. "To me, these are numbers, but you have to remember, when you have siblings, everyone thinks of money in a different way. I was trying to be an accountant, and they didn't like that."
Fern Schumer Chapman was hopeful about rebuilding a relationship with her brother when she wrote "Brothers, Sisters, Strangers: Sibling Estrangement and the Road to Reconciliation." The narrative caps off in 2021 with a postscript from her brother in his own words, updating readers about his graduation from college late in adulthood and his feelings about being close to his sister again.
Fast-forward a few years, and Chapman and her brother fell out again at the very end of their mother's life in 2024, and they're now no longer in contact with each other, she told MarketWatch. "One of the most perilous times with siblings is when the last parent passes," she said. "If the sibling relationship is not strong, there's a greater risk of it lapsing. The very issues that initially divide the siblings re-emerge."
There was no money by the end of her mom's life, which exacerbated the situation. Her mother had not communicated with Chapman's brother about this very effectively - which was not a new pattern of behavior, but a problem dating back to childhood that Chapman digs into in her book. The siblings had a controlling and demanding father and a mother who was a long-traumatized Holocaust survivor. After both parents were gone, it was too late to fix things.
Before the unfortunate coda to their story, Chapman and her brother seemed to be the perfect example of reconciliation. But life is complicated. Chapman may not have a relationship with her brother at the moment, but she has processed her emotions about it.
"I'm at peace about it now," she said. She lives by words of wisdom she gleaned from Laura Davis, the author of "The Courage to Heal," a self-help book for survivors of abuse. Davis wrote: "The opposite of estrangement is not reconciliation, it's peace."
-Beth Pinsker
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