Elder Care and South Asian Families

One of the most frustrating things about living so far away from my family is that I often don't get news until long after the fact. It turns out that my parents have been trying to provide care for my elderly grandfather, who's had a pretty nasty infection lately. He seems to be doing better now, but it sucks that I'm not able to be there to help. One of the frustrations of my life recently has been that I'm pulled between the relationships I have here in Chicago, my family obligations in Florida, and decisions about school/work that don't necessarily lend themselves to either.

This situation also got me thinking about the challenges of South Asian cultural values about caring for older relatives crashing into the modern American always-on work schedule. In India (as in most Asian cultures) your family will provide care to your older relatives. No question about it. You open your home to them, you feed them, you cater to them, and you attend to them when they are sick. It's simply your duty, and most Asians I know accept it proudly.

But what do you do with an older relative who needs round the clock attention? My parents, thanks to a set of "mixed blessing" circumstances over the past few years, were able to provide this type of care directly while also keeping their jobs. But this isn't an option for most. It's especially not an option for those South Asians with legendary "Kwik-E Mart"-style work schedules. How do you care for an older relative if someone from the family absolutely has to be at the store? Even without a 24-hour obligation, the work schedules of doctors, lawyers, and other professions hardly allow much time for care.

So how do people deal with this? Some families I know just revert to long-established, and often long-buried, gender roles, where the woman is just expected to turn away from work in order to stay at home to care for an elderly father or mother-in-law (it rarely goes the other way). This just sucks. It promotes gender inequality, and losing about half the income is not a viable economic option for most families. One alternative would be for the man to stay home, but this is almost guaranteed not to happen, both because of Indian cultural norms and because of the economic issues. The way American families generally deal with this is (organ music, please) the nursing home.

But man. The compromise of cultural values needed to get South Asians to accept a nursing home is huge. The word itself is almost a slur -- it's shorthand for the perception of disconnection and lack of caring in Western families. I can see South Asian families being forced into this option by economic or medical realities, but I can't see them liking it. Does anyone out there in blog-land know of Asian families who've had to go this route? How did it work out? What were the effects on the family?