Most of the family's attention goes to the person in the bed, and the caregiver's own life runs on whatever is left over. The appointment you meant to keep, the bill with the late notice, the car that needs its registration renewed: these do not announce themselves. They pile up in the same week that the hospice team is calling about visit times. Keeping your own life in working order is part of the caregiving job, and it needs an owner the same way the bed does.
Local option: New Plan Care gives families in the St. Louis area in-home help so a parent can stay home: companionship, help with bathing and dressing, meals, and overnight care. Call (314) 405-0887.
Write the list of what you normally keep up
Sit down with a pad and write everything you handle in an ordinary week that has nothing to do with your parent. Include your own appointments, the bills, the mail, the car, the pets, the yard, the grocery run, and the calls to family you usually make. Mark each item with one of two marks: the things that can wait a month without harm, and the things that cannot wait at all. The second group is the one that needs a named person.
Give each item one name
Every item gets one owner, even if the owner is you. A shared list with no names on it is how a bill gets paid twice or not at all. Put the name next to the item. If a sibling takes the mail and a neighbor takes the trash, write that down too, so the arrangement survives a bad week.
Fit your appointments around the visits
Hospice visits follow the team's calendar, not yours. Ask the team which days they usually come, and place your own appointments on the days that work for both. Tell the team when you will be away for an appointment, so they know who is in the house during that time and who to call. Your own doctor is the person to ask about your own care, and that conversation belongs to you.
Set up the backup before you need it
If you get sick, or your car breaks down on the way to a pharmacy or a clinic, somebody has to step in. Pick that person now and write their phone number on the same list. Decide what they are allowed to do in the house: sit with your parent, drive, pick up the mail, or fetch a sandwich. Then ask the hospice team what a stand-in may and may not do in the room. Medicine handling stays with the family, the doctor, and the pharmacist, so a stand-in should know that before they walk in.
Check the list once a week
Twenty minutes on the same day each week is enough. Read the list, cross off what is done, move anything that has slipped, and name the owner of anything new. The point is not to build a perfect system. It is to make sure the work you do for yourself does not depend on your memory alone, because that memory is already doing a great deal of other work.