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By Adam Safdi, WCI Columnist
On January 31, 2024, I received a call at 4am from a strange number. Normally, I keep my phone on vibrate overnight, but this number kept calling repeatedly. Eventually, I woke up and answered the phone. The caller said, “Adam? This is Adam, right? This is Jack, a friend of your dad. I’m sorry to call so early, but I have some distressing news.”
Jack went on to tell me that the police were taking my dad to the local hospital’s emergency department. Over the next few hours, we pieced together the story. My dad had wandered out of his house the night before, presumably to go for a walk. It started raining, and he became disoriented, unable to find his way home. He found a house with an unlocked door and went inside. He fell asleep in a spare bedroom. When he woke early the next morning, he became frustrated and confused by his unfamiliar surroundings.
The couple who lived there found him wandering in their kitchen. After the initial shock, they realized my dad posed no threat, but they called 911 due to the intrusion. No charges were filed, and the police recognized what our family had feared for some time: dementia. The local ER staff evaluated him for acute medical issues, and after finding nothing urgent, they sent him home.
I must first publicly express my gratitude to the couple who found my dad. I can only imagine how distressing it must have been to find a stranger in their home. I sent them a letter thanking them for their kindness and understanding.
Let me explain a little bit about my father’s situation. My mother passed away in 2018, and my father has lived alone since. He has a new girlfriend who lives 30 minutes away. My brother lives two hours away, and I live three time zones away. Up until that point, we knew he had some memory difficulties, and a local neurologist had diagnosed him with mild cognitive impairment.
But we didn’t think it was that severe.
There had been instances where my dad chose mismatched or inappropriate clothing, burned his toast, or replaced the telephone in the refrigerator instead of on the phone charger. However, after the January 2024 incident, we went back to his neurologist, who sadly confirmed that with my dad’s combination of cognitive and functional impairments—most notably his lack of direction, wandering, and getting lost—meant that he had progressed from mild cognitive impairment to dementia. It became clear that my dad was likely no longer safe to be by himself at home.
While my dad was the breadwinner during his working years, my mother managed the household finances. She and my father had bought long-term care (LTC) insurance policies for the possibility of prolonged illness later in life. As best as I can tell from the paperwork, my parents bought these policies in 2004, they each paid about $14,000 in annual premiums for 10 years, and the daily benefit started at $200 per day. I was unaware of these policies when my mother died (after a relatively short illness), but I became aware of them when an uncle called and mentioned, “Your father has a long-term care insurance policy. I helped him get it.”
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