Please help my mom stay in assisted living

Update -- January 2025. In the last year my mom's assisted living expenses have gone up 40%. She's still on the waiting list for a subsidy program and will hopefully move to the top later this year. In the meantime, I ask you to consider this, as described below. She spend much of her life volunteering for elderly people. The assisted living residence affiliated with the nursing home she volunteered at in the '70s and '80s declined our request to give her a break on prices. ("That's not how it works.") So please remember that she visited the elderly in this nursing home, taking the Ride-On bus and walking a long way to do it. Can we help her out? If you have any questions, please contact me. Thanks, Mike. -------

Hi. I’m making a request for donations so that my mother Fiona, who is in her late 80s, can stay in her assisted living residence where she has lived for two and a half years.

Most of her life, she helped other people, and now we’re hoping she can be on the receiving end of some help. She was a source of encouragement to everyone from infants and toddlers all the way the elderly.

She volunteered for elderly people most of her adult life. In the 1970s and 1980s, she would go to a local nursing home in Maryland to visit the residents there. She would take the bus because she never drove a car. Sometimes my sister, brother or I would go with her, and we’d walk part of the way.

Last year I called up the assisted living facility that is affiliated with the nursing home where she volunteered. I told them about how she had volunteered there many years ago. I asked if she could get a discount, but they turned her away.

She also volunteered for elderly people from her 20s until she was in her late 70s, making them feel special, having conversations and providing whatever help she could give. She visited some of the residents more than their own children did, whether through the church or otherwise.

She helped people throughout her career, offering encouragement or prayers to friends when they needed someone.

She started out in England working with disabled children. In New York, she was a nanny. In Maryland, she did day care in the apartments we grew up in, singing and playing piano, reading, doing art, and teaching the kids life lessons along the way.

She continued doing day care until she needed dialysis for a genetic kidney disease. After five years on dialysis, she had a successful kidney transplant 29 years ago.

She raised my sister, my brother and me as a single mother from the time we were young kids.

She has run out of money except for her monthly social security check, which covers just part of her expenses. My sister and I have been paying the difference. I recently took out a home equity loan to help cover the expenses.

She needs the care because she has early dementia and other ailments. Staying where she is would allow her to continue the best care, remain among good friends and familiar faces, and stay within driving distance of my sister and my family.

Assisted living is expensive everywhere. What she pays now is about the average for the state of Maryland. She is on the waiting list to move to another place that will accept a subsidy, which will be much more affordable, but that will take about a year and a half.

Thanks so much for considering contributing. Any donations will go directly to pay for her care. Upon request, I can send a receipt to donors that shows their donations went directly from a dedicated account to assisted living expenses.

She is pictured in the center between her brother, sister, and parents in Lancashire, England circa 1938.

Feel free to share this link. Thanks again!

"For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you." (Matthew 17:20-21).