Mick Jagger once famously sang “what a drag it is getting old.” Let’s face it, aging in America is fraught with all kinds of perils. One of those perils includes living alone.
Consider this scenario: your mom lives alone and you fear that she may be suffering from dementia or worse, Alzheimer’s Disease. She won’t accept any help from visiting nurses and she has several medical issues at her advanced age. You’ve arranged for her to receive Meals on Wheels but she doesn’t answer the door for them. You’ve noticed that she has become combative and aggressive. You’re worried about whether she’s putting herself in danger when you’re not there to look after her. Worse still, other people report some scary things about your mom like how she has a tendency to leave the stove on from time to time and how she wanders in the neighborhood. To make matters worse, you live an hour away, you have full-time job and you have responsibilities to your spouse and children. Your mom’s only other child – your brother – lives across the country in California, so he’s not around to help. Your mom will not even listen to suggestions of leaving the home she has lived in for decades. Sound familiar?
Unfortunately, you have no legal authority to help your mom. She does not have a power of attorney to manage her finances or an Appointment of Health Care Representative to manage her health care decisions. Even if you became her agent under those documents, you do not think she would make sound decisions for her care.
Having exhausted all options, you hire an attorney to file a conservatorship application with the probate court. The attorney files a petition seeking the court’s permission to appoint you to act as your mom’s conservator. The court issues a decree appointing you as the conservator of both her person and her estate. Now what? You’re convinced that your mom can no longer live alone in her own home. Your next move may be to place her in an assisted living facility or nursing home.
Connecticut law does not allow you to place a conserved person in an institution for long-term care – a nursing home or an assisted living facility – without permission from the court. You must file a petition with the probate court that approved the conservatorship. You must send a copy of the petition to your mom, her attorney and any other interested parties (like your brother in California). The law states that you must file this petition before any placement occurs. If your loved one is placed in a nursing home as a result of a hospital discharge, then you can file the petition after they’ve been placed. In that instance, however, you must file your petition with the court no later than five days after the placement.
In either case, the probate court will hold a hearing to determine whether to grant your petition. At the hearing, the court will accept evidence and hear testimony to determine what efforts you have made to tap into community resources in order to avoid placing your mom outside her home. The judge will also ask why you - as conservator - cannot meet your mom’s physical, mental and psychosocial needs in a less restrictive setting than a nursing home. If the judge is convinced that you’ve made efforts at trying to arrange for resources in the home and that your mother’s needs cannot be sufficiently met in any other way except by placing her in a nursing home, then it will issue a decree giving you the authority to place your mother in nursing home.
No one wants to face the possibility of forcing their loved one to move to a nursing home. The process for doing so is neither simple or easy. Probate courts take the moving of a conserved person out of their home very seriously. If you have questions related to moving a loved one to an institution for long-term care or about conservatorship matters generally, please don’t hesitate to call the estate planning and probate attorneys at Cipparone & Zaccaro, PC.
