As parents age, many families have to face the reality of nursing home care.

Pauline Roberts packed her dad’s life into a suitcase, took him to a nursing home, and went home and howled.

The 89-year-old gentleman stoically accepted that his care had become too much for his family – but he was not happy.

He was not happy to be in a nursing home, he was not happy to be old and frail, he was not happy to be parted from his beloved wife of 53 years or the animals that had been his constant companions for more than a decade.

But he smiled at Pauline, his youngest daughter, as she left him and said “I’ll be OK. Go on, off you go. I know you have taken a lot of time off work and I appreciate that very much.”

Pauline had been helping her mother care for her father for the past five years, as first one health problem and then another, and yet another, plagued him. There was a broken hip leading to a hip replacement, there was glaucoma leading to an eye operation, there was ‘indigestion’ leading to a diagnosis of bowel cancer.

Now, everyone was exhausted and her father’s higher and higher care needs could not be met by his close and loving family.

“We knew we would come to this at some point,” said Pauline, “but when it came it was devastating for us all.

“We have all given as much as we could for as long as we could and the truth is that we just can’t do it anymore, no matter how much we love dad.

“His care needs have become increasingly complex and his mobility increasing restricted to the point where he can’t get out of bed anymore without assistance.

“Showering, meals, personal care – these all have to be done for him now and it is a 24/7 job.”

Pauline said many of her friends in her age bracket were facing similar situations with ageing parents.

Barely done with parenting their own families (and many still with school-aged children), these carers are now being called on to care for their parents as their health fails and they become more and more dependent.

In Pauline’s case her employers, a government department, could not have been more supportive or helpful, giving her repeated extended leave to deal with one family crisis after another.

However, she has used all of her leave entitlements and is now on unpaid leave, which is imposing financial challenges.

“I have been very fortunate to have had exceptional workplace support, but not all of my friends are in the same situation,” Pauline said.

“Many of them have been placed under a lot of pressure at work and some have lost seniority due to the amount of leave they have needed to take.”

Pauline said while she and her family would ensure her father had as smooth a transition to nursing home life as possible, and would visit regularly, it was still heartbreaking to see his whole rich and interesting life reduced to one suitcase in one room.

“When I got home after getting dad settled at the nursing home I just cried and cried. It just didn’t seem right at all. Dad still has all of his intellectual faculties and was a highly skilled professional. To see him placed with older people with significant intellectual impairments is very hard – hard on him and hard on all the family.

“But the nursing home is one of the better ones and he will get good quality care there. At the end of the day, we felt we just did not have any other choice.”