on the cover / By Helen Sanderson

Home for Good

Trinidad’s grassroots plan to care for its own

(Feb. 15, 2007)  In her one-story Trinidad home overlooking the Pacific, 61-year-old Pat Morales leaves her bedroom door open at night. That way she can hear when her elderly mother wakes up and starts her odd, late-night routines down the hall - rearranging the closet, shuffling tax forms from the 1970s, packing suitcases. When her mother’s acting like this there’s no coaxing her back to bed, so Morales just listens and prays she doesn’t fall down.

“You lie in bed and you’re waiting for a thud,” Morales said one recent afternoon, looking toward her 92-year-old mother, Dorothy Burroughs, who dozed upright on the living room couch. “When you’re caring for somebody you don’t get any sleep. It’s a maternal thing. It’s like having a little baby.”

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A hip-shattering fall is what brought her mother to Trinidad from Livermore in 2005. Morales’ older sisters suggested they send their mother to a nursing home, but Morales didn’t think it was necessary yet. She didn’t realize, however, what a difficult task caring for her mother alone would be. Nor did she realize she would have to quit her job - paying a daytime caretaker cost more than her salary - or that she would have to resign from the Trinidad City Council. (A Times-Standardarticle from June 2005 cites “stress” as Morales’ reason for stepping down.) And she never would have guessed that she wouldn’t be able to leave her mother alone, not for a minute, not even to run up the road for a carton of eggs.

To say the least, the life of a round-the-clock caregiver is a challenge, and, unlike caring for a baby, it only gets harder with time. It can be isolating, financially burdensome, physically demanding and depressing in the clinical sense of the word. Last year Morales’ doctor gave her a prescription for an anti-depressant, Lexapro. But she soon stopped taking it because it made her feel “like a robot.” “I didn’t cry, I didn’t laugh,” she said.

Her situation is not unique. In fact, Morales closely mirrors the statistical profile of an average caregiver in America. Results from a study published in January’s Archives of Internal Medicinereported that 75.1 percent of end-of-life caregivers were female, with an average age of 64. And according to statistics from the United States Administration on Aging (AoA) one-third of all caregivers employed while caregiving gave up work either temporarily or permanently. National studies also show that depression is twice as likely among caregivers as non-caregivers.

Morales, a slim, garrulous Alameda County native who tends to talk with her hands, chalks up her ability to care for her mother this long - two years - in part, to the help she’s gotten from her friends and neighbors in Trinidad. Sometimes the help she receives might be as simple as having someone, like her neighbor Mary Wilbur, sit with her mom while she runs to the pharmacy in McKinleyville. Or it could be more serious, like the time she phoned her friend Donna Lin after her mother fell.

“I called the ambulance,” Morales said. “And, right after, I called Donna Lin. She got here before the ambulance. There wasn’t much she could do, but it was a comfort.”

Lin has been sort of a resident angel to seniors in Trinidad for years now, and it’s clear that Morales views her civic-minded friend with a certain amount of hero worship. She talks admiringly about Lin’s sense of humor, and how she’ll listen to Dorothy Burroughs’ gibberish and make conversation and laugh as if it all made perfect sense. And Morales will never forget the time when that bad storm knocked out the power and Lin drove around at 9:30 at night and brought lanterns to all the elderly folks in Trinidad.

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