Helping you navigate aged care, in the order it happens

He had a will. He had nothing else. No power of attorney, so the bank stalled. Centrelink had him as single, because the partner he had lived with for years was never declared. The house was a protected asset, until suddenly it was being assessed. Every form had a name you could not guess unless you already knew it.

I moved to become his power of attorney — there was a fraud running on his credit card, charges mounting while he could no longer notice them, and I needed the authority to stop it. Even that was delayed: James had placed a condition on the POA years earlier that I never knew about, and it surfaced at the worst possible moment.

That became the pattern. There was always another form — one I had never heard of, that I only found after hours on the phone, that turned into four more the moment I finished it, or that could not move until something else was done first. Some forms I filled in more than once. Time pressure, delays, urgency, and underneath all of it a father getting frailer while I sat on hold.

Then he died, and the calls and the forms did not stop — they multiplied. Death by a thousand cuts is the only way I can describe it. Each cut small. All of them together, at the worst time of your life, almost unbearable.

I am writing this out so you do not have to discover it the way I did — one missed form at a time. I will keep adding to it as I learn more. It is the thing I wish someone had handed me on the first day.