Life After Mother – Getting a Conservatorship Shouldn’t Be Like This

After my mother had a stroke and was diagnosed with dementia in 2017, I knew all the efforts of encouraging her to plan her estate were unsuccessful. Her dementia no longer allowed her to understand the situation and she was as unreasonable as ever. 

When persuasion fails and family finances are at risk, a conservatorship may be the answer, but getting one took me two years, encountering obstacles whether I approached the situation as a legal or medical matter. 

Lawndale, where my father once resided, had a senior advocate who was helpful with him, so I contacted that service for advice. The woman directed me to a legal-aid clinic that offered sporadic appointments at various Harbor Area senior centers. I went to one in Wilmington, where the legal “advice” consisted of a sales pitch for the clinic. Except the clinic practiced only in Los Angeles County — I needed someone who practiced in Orange County — they couldn’t help me there.

Neither Anaheim nor Orange County had a senior advocate similar to Lawndale, while Carson, where I resided, was useless, too. I paid for a referral from the Orange County bar and may have got the slimiest member they had. The guy jerked me around for a year, scoffing at the medical documents I produced and advising, “Talk to your mother some more,” before he all but ran me out of his office. He treated me like a greedy gold-digger, not someone who needed legal action.   

My mother’s health insurance was part of her pension. She had to use the bureaucratic health maintenance organization, or HMO, that came with it. I couldn’t just call my mother’s HMO and talk. The patient had to have an appointment — weeks or months away. Then I’d have to go, too and hope any questions I asked about the patient’s inability to handle her own affairs weren’t met with hysteria (from the patient) and/or stonewalling about “patient confidentiality” (from the HMO). They often were.

According to the HMO, they couldn’t discuss my mother’s condition with me because my name wasn’t on her chart as someone to discuss her condition with. When I protested I was my mother’s next-of-kin, a staffer mansplained, “California has no next-of-kin law, do you understand?” 

I told her, law or no law, I was my mother’s next of kin — and still got nowhere.

Trying to talk to my mother got either, “None of your business!” or else screaming that my name was there, although according to the HMO, it wasn’t.

After a wasted year someone coughed up a phone number for a senior case manager at the HMO. He said he’d flag my mother’s file for a “cap dec” (capacity declaration). She didn’t see her regular doctor again, though, until after she was placed in a nursing home in July 2019, two years after her dementia diagnosis. The doctor passed the buck, saying a neurologist would have to fill out the cap dec. First available neurology appointment? That’d be in November.

I was reluctant to go to random lawyers after the prior experiences, but I got an old-fashioned Orange County phone book and called lawyers, left messages. One message found a family-law lawyer who took the case. She pried a cap dec out of the HMO and a conservatorship out of the Orange County court system — a whole four days before my mother died.