Caring from afar

Kristy Bryner worries her 80-year-old mom might slip and fall when she picks up the newspaper, or that she’ll get in an accident when she drives to the grocery store. What if she has a medical emergency and no one’s there to help? What if, like her father, her mother slips into a fog of dementia?

Those questions would be hard enough if Bryner’s aging parent lived across town in Portland, but she is in Kent, Ohio. The stress of caregiving seems magnified by each of the more than 2,000 miles that separate them.

“I feel like I’m being split in half between coasts,” said Bryner, 54. “I wish I knew what to do, but I don’t.”

As lifespans lengthen and the number of seniors rapidly grows, more Americans find themselves in Bryner’s perilous position, struggling to care for an ailing loved one from hundreds or thousands of miles away.

“You just want to be in two places at once,” said Kay Branch, who lives in Anchorage, Alaska, but helps coordinate care for her parents in Lakeland, Fla., about 3,800 miles away.

There are no easy answers.

Bryner first became a long-distance caregiver when, more than a decade ago, her father began suffering from dementia. He died in 2010. She used to be able to count on help from her brother, who lived close to their parents, but he died of cancer a few years back. Her mother doesn’t want to leave the house she’s lived in for so long.

So Bryner talks daily with her mother via Skype. She’s lucky to have a job that’s flexible enough that she’s able to visit for a couple of weeks every few months.

“Someone needs to check on her, someone needs to look out for her,” she said. “And the only someone is me, and I don’t live there.”

Many long-distance caregivers say they insist on daily phone calls or video chats to hear or see how their loved one is doing.

Yet there always is the unexpected: Medical emergencies, problems with insurance coverage, urgent financial issues.

“There are lots of things that you have to do that become these real exercises in futility,” said Ed Rose, 49, who lives in Boston but, like his sister, travels frequently to Chicago to help care for his 106-year-old grandmother, Blanche Seelmann.

Rose has rushed to his grandmother’s side for hospitalizations, and made unexpected trips to solve bureaucratic issues.

He uses Skype to speak with his grandmother every day and tries to be there whenever she has a doctor’s appointment. Aides handle many daily tasks and have access to a credit card for household expenses. He has an apartment near his grandmother to make sure he’s comfortable on his frequent visits.

Lynn Feinberg, a caregiving expert at AARP in Washington, D.C., said the number of long-distance caregivers is likely to grow, particularly as a sagging economy has people taking whatever job they can get, wherever it is.

“It’s a huge stress,” she said. “It can have enormous implications not only for someone’s quality of life, but also for someone’s job.”

It can also carry a huge financial burden. A November 2007 report by the National Alliance for Caregiving and Evercare, a division of United Health Group, found annual expenses incurred by long-distance caregivers averaged about $8,728.