Blindsided

 Our best wishes to everyone for a happy holiday weekend.  Before we put the next post up, we are going to take the next few days to rest, reset and cherish this holiday season! We will be dining at some of our favorite restaurants and going to see The Embers Christmas Show at the Rialto Theatre Saturday night.  This may be our last Christmas in our home and we face the most difficult month ahead of us but right in this time and place we are safe.  Please keep us in your thoughts.  Happy Holidays!  Charles and Susan Murray 

About six - eight months prior to Jean going into assisted living, we started to see a  decline in her mental capacity.  We had hired aids that were with her three to four days a week and she continued to live at home until it was clearly unsafe for her to be alone.  Jean moved into assisted living in August 2011.   In a ten year period, Jean was in four different assisted living facilities.  Two in Raleigh, one in Lilington and one in Wendell.  For the first move,    Jean wanted a private apartment, and even though she had long term care, it did not last long as we were paying over $8,000.00 per month.  In addition we still paid for private care for the first year, along with medications, personal care, etc. The money she received in Social Security and Retirement were used to pay these costs.  Eventually, we had Jean move in with a roommate,  and the expense was slightly lower.  This was about the same time that Jean started getting aggressive, with staff and fellow patients at the f

In this post, I am going to briefly review the course of events from January 2005 - August 2011.  This was prior to Jean entering assisted living. From the beginning of our relationship in 2004, Jean was  very involved in our life.  She was always a very controlling woman, especially over Charles, her only son.   A lot of you don’t know this but Charles suffers from an auto immune disorder and he has been on disability since 1999.   In 2005 Charles and I decided to move in together and we rented the home we currently live in.  After a year, we all talked about the possibility of us buying a home in the North Raleigh area.  Jean wanted to make sure that Charles always had a home to live in.    After looking at several homes, we approached the owner of the home we were renting and it closed in July 2006.  Jean has a revocable living trust, and the home was put into the trust.  In part, this was what Jean thought was best to do to protect Charles, but also a way to control him.   Initiall

 In writing this blog, I hope that families who are facing putting loved ones in assisted living or long term nursing care don’t make the mistakes that we did.  I will chronicle our story over the past 12 years, more specifically the last two years, and how we were blindsided by a legal system that is vague and inconsistent.  Because of our nativity and trust in the system our family could be homeless in the next two months. Over the past 12 years, The cost of Jean’s care has been close to $900,000.00, exhausting all finances and now jeopardizing the house that Jean had setup in a trust for Charles back in 2006.  We have lived in the home for 19 years and now face being evicted by the Trustee of her estate.   I will explain the details in future posts of our two year court battle with the nursing home facility and attorneys over guardianship and trustee control that we have lost, and now face eviction from the current Trustees for the home we have paid for and maintained all the years.