Balancing Act

Ten years ago, on the exact same day, Liz O’Donnell learned that both of her parents had terminal illnesses.?

At the time, O’Donnell was already stretched thin: She was a marketing exec and her family’s sole breadwinner who had her hands full raising two young children. Now, she needed to find a way to care for her father with Alzheimer’s and her mother with late-stage ovarian cancer.

“I was thrust into a full-blown crisis,” she tells us.

Sadly, O’Donnell’s experience is not uncommon. According to the AARP , there are currently 53 million caregivers in the U.S. —?and 73% of them are still working. Juggling both is a grueling experience, and it often takes a toll on an employee’s career. An AARP survey found that half of caregivers need to go in late, leave early, or take time off; 15% cut their hours; and 6% give up working altogether.

“I felt alone and utterly unprepared for it,” says O’Donnell, the author of Working Daughter: A Guide to Caring for Working Parents While Making a Living , and a consultant who helps others going through this uniquely challenging ordeal.

We asked O’Donnell for some tips to help pull off this balancing act:

• Use the buddy system: “Having a buddy for someone in an acute caregiving situation is really great. One of my coworkers stepped up when I was taking care of my parents: He went to our boss and told them that he’d like to help me out at work. He acted as my co-pilot. It wasn’t redundancy; more of a backstop — he was aware of everything that I had due, everything that I was expected to receive from my coworkers, things like that.”
• Stay on top of your to-do list: “I always tell people to do everything they can to keep their house in order. Once, I had to drive two hours round-trip to file an expense report that I was already three months behind on. Work would have been forgiving if it were a couple days late, but they told me, ‘We really need this now.’ So do what you can to make sure you’re on top of things, so that you don’t have a crisis develop while you’re already in the middle of a crisis.”
• Keep networking: “It’s difficult to continue to network, but it’s important to keep those relationships alive. Once every couple weeks, go on LinkedIn and shoot a connection a message. It’s important to keep those lines of communication open in case you need them later.”
• Be careful about how you communicate your situation: “Ideally, we’d all be able to go to our managers and let them know what’s going on at home. But you really have to evaluate your own corporate culture to see if that makes sense for you. I tell people to not disclose specific details. If you need to take your father to chemo every Friday, I think it’s better to tell your boss that you’re going to need some personal time for a family situation every Friday. Then be very clear about how you have things covered and when you can expect to hear back from me. Really focus on communicating how you’re going to be accountable.”

Working Daughter’s top 10 places to work for caregivers

For the past three years, O’Donnell’s organization, Working Daughter, has published a list of employers providing the best support for caregivers. Many of these companies provide time off and even stipends for eldercare and prescription drugs. Take a look at the top 10 :

• AbbVie
• BBB National Programs
• Careforth
• CareSource
• 思科
• The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC)
• 爱思唯尔
• Fannie Mae
• 摩根士丹利
• Navient

The Long Goodbye

You probably know Barbara Corcoran as the real-estate mogul and star of the hit show Shark Tank. You may even be familiar with her awe-inspiring rags-to-riches story. The 75-year-old has led a very public life, but there’s one thing she’s never talked about with the press — until recently.?

We spoke with Corcoran about caring for her mother Florence, who died years ago after a lengthy battle with Alzheimer’s. “The difficult part was seeing that blank look in my mother’s eyes,” she tells us. “To see the lights go out so slowly in a woman who was so bright and engaged and vital.”?

In this new interview , Corcoran discusses what it was like for her and her nine siblings to look after her mother, her advice for others in the same situation, and more — including the very surprising motivator for her success in real estate.

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