I put my father in a nursing home at age 98. Then I brought him home.

hootieHooties Take: With LTC insurance, this woman would have had the option to keep her dad at home and hire an in-home caregiver or she could have gotten paid cash benefits for caregiving for her own father.

For years, and especially as he entered his 90s, my father had begged me not to “dump” him into a nursing home. He had seen that happen to too many of his cronies, and his visits with them left him feeling depressed for days. I assured Dad I’d never put him in a facility.

It was an easy promise to make. I envisaged him in a “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” setting, supervised by a heartless Nurse Ratched, and I didn’t want that for him, either. I didn’t want him waking up at night disoriented and lonely. Because he was inching closer to death, the greatest unknown, I didn’t want an institution, with all its unknowns, replacing his familiar apartment, which I’d shared with him for more than a decade.

But in May last year, six weeks after Dad turned 98, I broke my promise

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