Marty Stevens Heebner:
It's hard to believe, but How To Move Your Mom (and Still be on Speaking Terms Afterward) is over two years old as a podcast. Really amazing, and thank you for being so supportive of us. In the last episode, there were a couple of wonderful stories that I had to edit out for time, and it's occurred to me that there are a couple of stories I'd like to tell, so that's what this episode is all about, stories.
Moving your mom or your dad or yourself isn't just about moving things from one place to another. It is much more complicated than that, as are so many things having to do with later life. How To Move Your Mom (and Still be on Speaking Terms Afterward) provides in-depth conversations with professionals, older adults, and their family members who share their stories with warmth, understanding, and humor. I'm your host, Marty Stevens-Heebner, and here you'll find answers to many of your questions as well as different perspectives that I hope will inform and inspire you.
When I was recording our last episode with Courtney Hogenson of Call-Light, she told a couple of wonderful stories that I had to edit out and I'd really like to include those because they're very moving. I'm also going to include a fun story from Sue Pomerantz of Concepts for Living. It was our very first episode. Then there are a couple of stories I'd really like to share because I find that the older adults and their families we get to work with are just remarkable and really impact our lives in so many different ways. To start things off, this story is from Sue Pomerantz of Concepts for Living. She is one of the most fiercely respected people working in senior services in the whole LA area, and she had a great family story to share.

Sue Pomerantz:
My grandfather was an observant Jew and he would walk his little self up the hill in West Hollywood to his synagogue every single morning. There was a very short period of time where I lived with him and his daughter, my aunt, while I was visiting LA and I had met my husband the summer before. So I was up very, very late and come home, and my aunt was an all-nighter, so I would go in and talk to her for a little while and we would hear my grandfather get up at five o'clock in the morning. And I would run from my aunt's room to the sofa where I slept, jump under the covers fully dressed, see, Marty, these are things you never knew about me, pull the covers up, and then he would go into the kitchen, he would make his hot water and lemon drink, and he would say his prayers, and he would leave for synagogue. I would get into something more comfortable for sleeping purposes and go back to bed.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
I did not know that about you. I love that. And your aunt is a night owl like you are.

Sue Pomerantz:
She was. We were so blessed to have him.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Sue tells such fun stories, great sense of humor. And now a couple of stories from Courtney Hogenson of Call-Light. Courtney is a great storyteller and you would never know that my interview with her was the first time she'd ever been on a podcast. You had this experience back when you were in LA and was seeing Joe.

Courtney Hogenson:
Oh, Joe.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Can you talk about that because that was a remarkable story?

Courtney Hogenson:
He was a remarkable human being, but he's passed now. He just lived one of those lives that you can't make it up. He grew up during the Great Depression, his family lost everything, moved across the country in a car with a cradle and everything they had in this car from Detroit out to California. Joe and his brother ended up getting polio at a young age, so it was hardship after hardship for these guys. At the age of 8 or 10, Joe went into the hospital, they said, "Oh, he is never going to walk again." So he spent a year at the LA County Hospital. He'll say, "Courtney, I was so lucky I didn't ever have to have an iron lung. I only lost the use of my legs. I knew people that couldn't use their arms." And I'm just like, "Okay, wow."
So Joe was the rare, not a perfect person by any means, but in that time of his life, these were his golden years and I'd be going through something like fertility issues were going on at the time. I never told him about it because I didn't want to burden him with that, but I would go see this man who is not doing well and he's in a wheelchair and all the things. And I'd say, "Joe, how are you today?" And he'd say, "It's a miracle I'm alive. Can you believe I'm alive? How is that even possible? Can you believe that?" And it got to the point where he was really suffering. Cancer had gone into his bones. He was in a lot of pain and he was very stoic. And it went back to when he was the kid with polio. They used to call him crybaby in the hospital because they didn't want to give him pain medication.
They didn't want him to get hooked. So this child was crying and the nurses, the other patient, everyone called him crybaby. He said, "It finally stopped hurting. I think the nerves died and I finally just stopped crying." So he had this memory of being tough. So once he got to the point where he was really actively in pain, I had to almost give him permission, "Joe, it's okay. You don't have to suffer. You don't have to suffer." Because the nurses said they tried and tried, the hospice nurses, he won't take anything. And I walked in the house and I could just hear him moaning and I was just, "If it's the last thing I can do is let him know that it's okay."
And by no means did I force him, but I just went to him and I just said, "It is okay." And I used to worry about him before we got to that point. He started to sleep a lot more and I was like, "Oh, he's depressed. I'm worried about him." And it's just amazing how you start to think, "Oh, if that was me, that's how I would feel." But they're in such a different place and I would go see him. I'd be like, "Joe, are you depressed? You're sleeping a lot. You're spending a lot of time in bed." And he'd say, "It's the best. I'm having the best dreams. I get to see my mom. I get to see my brother. I'm flying." It's like they were preparing him for the great beyond.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Yeah, his departure.

Courtney Hogenson:
Yeah.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
And you talk about somebody who everything is a sunlit and shadow side, we know that, always looking into the sunlight, that's who he was.

Courtney Hogenson:
Yeah.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
That's who he was. I love that story. I love Joe. You also had a client who you were playing music for them as they were leaving and lighting candles. Who is that person where you created this amazing environment as they were actively dying?

Courtney Hogenson:
This woman was Linda. She was one of the most unique individuals and she was actually quite young. She was only in her early 60s. And she had interstitial lung disease, never smoked a day in her life, and ended up getting a lung transplant. And most people aren't aware, but once you get any type of transplant, you have to take immunosuppression drugs and you're vulnerable after that because you're trying to get your body to not reject this new organ, but you're very vulnerable to other things. So Linda, this is one of those stories you don't want to get me started, she picked up the flu on accident from a friend and sent her into rejection. And she wasn't a candidate for another lung transplant.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
It was rejecting the lungs.

Courtney Hogenson:
And it was just one of those cases where her friend, the flu didn't really hurt her, but it's people like that I get the flu shot for because I'll be fine. I may have a day or two where I'm down and out, but it may push someone like that over the edge where they can't recover. So that's why I always get my flu shot.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
This is what vaccinations are for, is to keep everybody safe, not just you.

Courtney Hogenson:
So I was going away to Hawaii for a wedding and I thought she was going to pass before I got back. And I just remember telling her how much I loved her and I grew very close with her over a very short period of time. She did not want to die. She had a lot to live for, she had her first grandbaby, and just helping her cope with that was really nice. So when I got back from Hawaii, I couldn't believe she was still there and she said, "Can you come over? I feel like I think this is it. I think it's eminent." And I said, "Absolutely." So I got there and her caregiver from the day shift stayed, so we had two caregivers there. And she's so funny. She said, "I came into the world of my birthday suit and I think I should leave in my birthday suit."
So she stripped down and she climbed into bed and we put on Brian Eno for her, just really beautiful ambient music. And one of the caregivers was rubbing her head and one of them was rubbing her feet. I think I was rubbing her hands and we were just asking her her best memories. So she's talking about, "You have to go to Africa, Courtney. It was one of the most amazing things I ever did." She said her worst fear was to wake up in the hospital. That was her worst fear. She just didn't want to wake up in the hospital. I promised her I'd stay until she passed. And she didn't pass until 4:00 AM, but we stayed there with her because I feel nobody should be alone if they don't want to be when they pass. And it felt like such a gift to give that to her.
She was in her own bed surrounded by people that loved her, and she was telling us her life story. And one of the things was she grew up, I don't know if it was Alabama, Georgia, somewhere in the Deep South, and she was a school teacher and she said, "Oh, I got in trouble one time with the KKK because I was teaching the kids that they should all love each other and that we're all equal." And I said, "Oh, please tell me more." And she said, "They started harassing me and one time they tried to run me off the road in my little VW bug. I'm just like this young teacher. So they run me off the road." And I said, "Were you scared?" She said, "Yeah, I thought they were going to kill me." I said, "Did they shut you up?" "No, that kind of thing is worth dying for." And this woman went on to become the high school principal, then the superintendent, and then the life coach. And she was just one of those people where you're just like, "Wow, it's a privilege."

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Such a heart and such experience and such courage. What a privilege and what a wonderful way to depart and how wonderful that she was accessing all those long-term memories that are very deep.

Courtney Hogenson:
She was just so special and so many of them are. I feel it's such a gift to be able to give that to someone if they want to die in their own home. Often they don't want to die but aren't ready to die, but it's okay. The writing's on the wall, let's make it as comfortable as we can.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Now, you would probably know this better than me because you're a nurse and understand health and medical issues far better than I, but first the brain start to die. And I remember being with both my parents, they died at very different times, but they both were adamant about not going to the hospital. They had to do not resuscitate, DNRs, but because they were actively dying, the fear kicked in from the old brain because it just wants our body to survive. That's its job and it's very good at doing that. But to me, it seems natural that kicks in at the end because the body just wants to survive and then eventually things go quiet.

Courtney Hogenson:
Yeah. You're right. Every death is a little bit different depending on what their disease process and their age and all that. But it just starts to become a systemic thing where one system shuts down and then another one starts to shut down. And sometimes it's all of them a little bit at once and sometimes it's one and then another. So it just depends. And I think what we can do for those people during those times, especially as healthcare professionals, is just to guide them and to make them feel comfortable. And if they want to cry, let them cry. If they want to scream, let them scream. Just meet them where they are and accept them and just do whatever you can. I just always think how would I want someone to treat me if that was me?

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Yeah. It's so important because they're still here. Our culture turns our back on death, doesn't want to talk about it. So we've heard all the stories about oncologists who can be really cold to their patients because they've seen so many of them die, but then maybe you shouldn't be an oncologist.

Courtney Hogenson:
What's funny is I remember going with Joe who had prostate cancer, who we talked about earlier, I remember going with him to the oncologist because we just wanted to make sure he knew what his options were and we just wanted to know, "Okay, how bad is this?" So we go and the oncologist, "Yes, you have stage four prostate cancer. It's everywhere." Okay, that's not great, but we're not surprised because he hadn't been to the doctor in 10 years. Who knows?

Marty Stevens Heebner:
It is what it is, right?

Courtney Hogenson:
And I just started to think, "If I wasn't here with him, Joe's going to do whatever this doctor says," because what started to happen was the doctor said, "Okay, we're going to set you up for chemo. We're going to set you up for radiation." He was having him go down this path that, look, if he was 40, I understand.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
How old was he?

Courtney Hogenson:
He was 85. And I'm just thinking, "Oh, thank you for your opinion. Thank you very much. We'll talk this over with the family." I get in the car and I call the daughter-in-law and I'm explaining to her, she goes, "Oh my God, they'll kill him."

Marty Stevens Heebner:
And make his life miserable.

Courtney Hogenson:
Yes. And I told him, "I will support whatever you want to do. If you want to fight this thing like that." And he just said, "I just want to enjoy what time I have left. I don't want to be spending my time going for chemo, radiation, and side effects." And he lived for another three years, and a great three years.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
If chemo and radiation can battle the cancer, I have to wonder if that misery can end up taking you out because they always separate the mental from the physical, but the brain is in the body.

Courtney Hogenson:
All connected. I remember another one, Mr. Chamberlain. He was so amazing and he had cancer and he was older up there like Joe. And he went through all those things because his wife was still alive and he really wanted to stick around as long as he could. That treatment ended up killing him, I think, faster than the cancer would have. But you just don't know. So you really have to just go in with an open mind and get as much information as you can and then let them decide. But I think a lot of times it's not even presented to them, what are the odds and what does the usual course look like for someone in their 80s going through this? They don't talk about it and they should.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
There was an early episode of How To Move Your Mom where a friend of mine talked about talking to the doctors about letting her mother go because her mother had been so clear with her, "If I'm stuck with this feeding tube to keep me alive, palliative care only. Make me comfortable, let me go." And it's hard. I can't imagine not knowing, with my mother, for example, with cancer, she died in 1988 at the age of 58. And in the 70s, there was the Karen Ann Quinlan case where she was younger and she was comatose. It was her parents who wanted to let her go, and there was a court battle and the parents won. My mom said multiple times while that was going on, if I wind up at that state, let me go. She made it really clear so that when she was on the runway to just make her comfortable, give her some extra Demorol, and. It's so hard because you miss them so much. I love your stories. They're great.
Weren't those phenomenal? I always enjoy talking with Courtney and with Sue. They've become very dear friends over the years and I'm so grateful they're in my life. As you may have noticed, the first question I always ask my guests is, what's your favorite memory of your grandparents? There are a couple of reasons I do that. First of all, I love hearing their stories and I hope you do too. It also, for the interviewee, puts them in a good place because they're remembering some wonderful memory and it opens them up as the interview continues. So that's the reason I do that. And I thought it only fair to share one of my favorite stories about my grandparents. I was the youngest in our whole generation of cousins, so my grandparents were pretty old when I was born, so I don't have a lot of memories of them.
I think my favorite one is spending time with my father's father, my grandpa, on Long Island. They lived in Massapequa Park and one afternoon he and I were out for a stroll. I was probably seven years old, I think, and the maple trees were shedding their, I think they're called helicopter seeds or something, and I collected a whole bunch. When we got back home, my seven-year-old self made my dad help me plant the seeds. And believe it or not, all these years later, those full-grown trees are still there. They're enormous. Every year, they're so big, they're tangled in the phone wires. So the city, Buffalo, they have to send around a team to trim the branches so they don't take down the wires in case there's a storm. And I hadn't been home for 10 years and I thought maybe they were gone, but actually, I visited a few months ago and they're still there.
So that's my favorite grandparent story. As for clients, many of them are so memorable. One of my favorite clients ever was someone we worked with in the very early years of Clear Home Solutions. I was still working in the field and we were working with this wonderful woman named Rose. Her husband had died, I think, in the past year. She missed him terribly. There are a couple of great parts of Rose's story. One of Rose's stories has to do with donating. Rose and her husband started out with nothing. They ended up being very successful, but when they started out, they really had very little. So she went around to garage sales to amass enough dishes to feed everybody, and especially if there's a holiday or something, and she still had a lot of those dishes all those years later. She'd like to get white dishes with some sort of floral pattern on them. And by this time, there's quite a stack and a lot of them had cracks or were compromised in some way.
I remember Rose saying, "I guess we'll just have to toss these and get rid of them." And I said, "No, we're going to donate these and another Rose is going to come along. She's going to be so glad she can buy these for a really low price." And Rose just lit up because she remembered being that Rose, being that person who was searching for some plates that were in decent shape that she could use because she didn't have the money to spend. That's what donating is about. It's really giving gifts to people who you'll never meet. And Oprah figured it out, the best part about gifts is being the giver. There's another wonderful story I love to tell about Rose. She was, I think, in her 80s. She had some hip trouble, so she got around on a walker and was hunched over and she had short, very curly, frizzy gray hair and glasses.
She was the quintessential grandmother, the way she looked. I was working with her and we were going through the books on the bedstand. There was a huge stack on either side of the bed. She and her husband had been big readers. So I'm going through, "Do you want to keep this? Do you want to let it go?" And I came to the, "Joy of Sex." And I looked at Rose and she looked at me and I said, "You go, Rose." This is great. And she smiled. It was so great. And I kept digging through the books. By the time I got to the bottom, there had been four books about sex. She said, "We were a very happy couple." And I just loved it and I think she appreciated being thought of as a sensual woman, as an older woman because it doesn't go away. Believe me, there's all kinds of relationships going on in senior living communities. So keep that in mind. That feeling never goes away, and that's wonderful.
The last story I'm going to tell is about a client named Helen. She really didn't want to move to assisted living, but she was living in an apartment in Hollywood. She lived there for decades, literally. She had a lot of stuff. She was going blind and losing her hearing, and she had been leaving the gas on on the stove every so often. Yikes. So, she needed to move. Apparently, she'd been quite the singer when she was younger, so a bit of a diva. We have a lot of them in Los Angeles. And I remember her saying about moving to the senior living community, "I feel like I'm moving to the place I'm going to die." I think I audibly gulped and I replied with, "I get why you feel that way. I get it. Here's something to think about, you have a whole third act to live out."
She lit up with that, the singer, the diva, "When you move to a senior living community, they'll do all the cooking, they'll do the cleaning. If you so much a sneeze," and this is before COVID, "they're there to take care of you." And that helped adjust her thinking. One of the key things if you're talking to a family member or a loved one or your spouse about moving like that to a senior living community and they feel that way, they may not say it out loud, but they may express all kinds of different feelings. Don't ever negate their feelings, accept their feelings. You may not be feeling that way, but that's how they feel in that moment. So just say, "I get it. I understand. Tell me more about that. Why do you think you're feeling that way?" Because then they're more relaxed. They won't shut down and not talk to you or get angry or anything like that. Have a conversation.
I get that probably you're going through a lot of stress too, and it's probably good for you to have that conversation too with them and talk about your own feelings. It can really help to move things forward, and sometimes you get to listen to another great story that you hadn't heard before. So those are the stories I wanted you to hear. I hope you enjoyed them. Thank you for listening to How To Move Your Mom (and Still be on Speaking Terms Afterward). I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have.
Thank you so much for listening to How To Move Your Mom (and Still be on Speaking Terms Afterward). Please visit howtomoveyourmom.com for more information about this episode and for additional podcast episodes featuring other extraordinary guests and conversations. Until next time, this is your very grateful host, Marty Stevens-Heebner.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Caregivers, whether they're paid or they're volunteering, make home life so much easier for older adults and their families, but they don't have the training necessary where serious health and medical issues are involved. Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could have a registered nurse on call? My guest today, Courtney Hogenson, has an app for that. Moving your mom or your dad, or yourself isn't just about moving things from one place to another. It is much more complicated than that, as are so many things having to do with later life. How to Move Your Mom (and still be on speaking terms afterward) provides in-depth conversations with professionals, older adults, and their family members who share their stories with warmth, understanding, and humor.
I'm your host, Marty Stevens-Heebner, and here you'll find answers to many of your questions, as well as different perspectives that I hope will inform and inspire you. Courtney Hogenson, it is so good to see you.

Courtney Hogenson:
So good to see you, Marty. I wish we were in person.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
I really miss you. You're in Austin, I'm in Los Angeles, but we used to hang out a lot. Let me tell you a little bit about Courtney's brilliance. Courtney Hogenson, who's a registered nurse and patient advocate with over 10 years of experience in elder care and healthcare worker empowerment. That's key.
She's also a serial entrepreneur, and her latest venture is Call-Light, an innovative healthcare platform where anyone can safely hire an experienced nurse or a clinician of their choosing for in-home healthcare anytime, anywhere. I just think that's so brilliant, but we'll get into that but first, what's your favorite memory of your grandparents?

Courtney Hogenson:
I think of my grandfather, my dad's dad who had Alzheimer's, which was not great, but it was such an amazing experience to be around him. When I was a teenager, he moved into my parents' home so that they could help care for him, and just being around him and living in the moment with him. My favorite memory was when I was 16, and I got the call from my mom, and she said, "Can you go pick up Paul from jail?," and I said, "What?" I was 16, so I could barely drive anyway, and she said, "Yeah. Paul escaped from the adult daycare today," and in a small town in Texas, people don't lock their car doors, so he just got in someone's car, and when the guy came back from the gas station, he got in, and Paul was just like, "Where are we going?" The guy's, "Who are you?," and he's all, "My name is Ralph," and so they had to call the sheriff's department, and they didn't know what to do with him 'cause he couldn't tell them where he lived, so I had to drive to jail and pick up my grandfather.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
I love that you sprung him from prison. That's so funny.

Courtney Hogenson:
And unfortunately, he wasn't able to go back to the adult daycare, 'cause safety reasons. He's a flight risk. But it was just seeing what that was like for families like, "What do you do when you need help?"

Marty Stevens Heebner:
It's this very funny, but also very poignant story. He was so lucky to have such a loving granddaughter, who would come and spring him from jail.

Courtney Hogenson:
I feel like he would've done the same for me.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
So as a nurse and a patient advocate, you really believe in trying to keep people living in their homes for as long as possible. What's so important about that?

Courtney Hogenson:
I think of myself and being at home. I mean, it's where your stuff is and it's where you feel most comfortable and at ease, and home is different for everybody. For some people, maybe being in a different kind of home is better. You have to really meet the person where they are. I remember having a big CEO who was a gabillionaire, and the family, the kids were like, "Oh, dad needs to be at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Dad needs to be at the Peninsula," and I'm like, "Your dad has severe Alzheimer's disease."
"If we were to take your dad back to the mansion or to one of these hotels, they're not equipped for him. They're unfamiliar to him, and they're so large." You can't do that to someone like that. It's not right. They need a familiar environment and something that feels secure and all those things.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
When we're moving people into, say, a board and care, or in other parts of the country, it's called a nursing home, it's so important to have those familiar family pictures on the wall that they've known for ages because, I don't have to tell you, the registered nurse, it's the older memories that last the longest. It's got to feel familiar.

Courtney Hogenson:
And every home's a little bit different. They try to recreate what they loved about their home, 'cause sometimes it doesn't make sense for them to stay in a big house or a big whatever. Sometimes you need to downsize. I find a lot of people move into condos and buildings so they don't have to deal with the yard work, and yeah.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
You're talking to a person who really appreciates living in a condo and not having to mow the lawn.

Courtney Hogenson:
Yeah.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
One of the things with caregiving and having nurses come to the home, is that covered by insurance, or is it private pay?

Courtney Hogenson:
I'm glad you asked that. When I was working in the ICU, as a nurse at UCLA, I always thought when my patients were leaving, and they were going home with home health or hospice, I thought they're going to be taken care of at home. We're just going to do a handoff, and it was just such an eye-opening experience to find out, even if someone is actively dying on hospice, qualifies for all these things, the thing that's never ever covered by Medicare or insurance is round-the-clock caregiving. Let's say you do qualify for hospice. You don't just get to sign up for it.
You have to have two doctors sign on, that you have less than six months to live, and all these things. Even if someone is eminently dying, if that hospice company doesn't have someone available, someone can't just show up. I just remember families really had to either do it themselves or hire through an agency, hire through a registry, and there's tons of different caregiving agencies, and it's like a dime a dozen, but it's also, it's your home, and it's scary to just let anyone in your home. You're not going on Craigslist to bring someone in your home.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Who can you trust?

Courtney Hogenson:
A lot of the patients, they have cognitive impairment, or they have memory issues, or mobility issues, and they're very dependent on these caregivers, to the point where it can become undue influence, it can become these gifts, all sorts of things. You've seen it all once you've been in home health, and sometimes it's not the people you think you have to watch out for, sometimes it's people that very much surprise you. Sometimes it's an attorney, sometimes it's a doctor, sometimes it's a nurse, sometimes it's the adult child. You just never know.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
And so frequently, it is a family member, and that's just heart-wrenching.

Courtney Hogenson:
I feel like I've seen the really good and the really bad, 'cause I have seen the daughter-in-law, who's husband passed away and it's her husband's dad, and she's left in charge of him. The man never spent any money on himself, so she says, "Dad, I can't wait to spend all this money on you," and she did that. She put him in one of the nicest homes. She had me come a few times a week. Those were his golden years.
He was happier in those last couple years of his life than he ever was before. He was taken care of. He's like, "They take care of everything here. They take care of me. They even wash me."

Marty Stevens Heebner:
I hope so. Well, yes, we like washing. It's so wonderful to be pampered like that. You and I are both part of that movement.
It's our mission in life, to make later life comfortable, safe, celebrated, cherished, for those who are in their later years. You and I have a huge goal, especially 'cause we'll be there eventually.

Courtney Hogenson:
Yeah. I mean, we hopefully get the privilege to live that long, and let's learn what we can from our clients, from our families. "Oh, that's what it looks like if you do take care of this. That's what it's like if you don't. I want to be more like her or him when I get to 100 or whatever."

Marty Stevens Heebner:
I would love it if you would describe what the big differences are between what a caregiver can provide to a client and what a registered nurse can do for them.

Courtney Hogenson:
There's really so many different levels of care, and every caregiver and every nurse may have different specialties, different certifications. So I always tell families, "The thing you need to know that a caregiver should not be held responsible for is if you're ever administering medication or you're putting something into an orifice anywhere." If you're inserting anything into an opening or taking something out, that should be a nurse, and that includes needles and G tubes, PEGs. If you're following all the rules and regulations, a caregiver that is not a nurse should never be touching or administering medications of any kind. They can remind someone legally for liability reasons.
You just want to make sure everyone's staying within their scope of practice, and that's why nurses can help in home because they're already covered by the board of nursing. When someone leaves the hospital, there is a doctor who's written any order or a medication, there's post-op, there's discharge orders, a nurse can do any of those things, but a caregiver sometimes get put in those positions to do things.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
It's wonderful what you're offering.

Courtney Hogenson:
There's all these gaps in care. It's like you're taken care of when you're in the hospital, but I always feel like if you don't need to be in the ER or the ICU, go home. Bring someone to you. Something good that happened with the pandemic, 'cause there were some silver linings is telehealth. People are now starting to recognize that you can do things a little differently.
In a way, we're going backwards to go forward again. Telehealth was around a long time ago, but it never really took off 'cause people didn't need it. They were like, "Nah. No, I can go in," but now, you don't want to spread germs, you don't want to pick up anything you don't have to pick up. There's just so much you can get done at home, and I think if you can choose your own nurses, your own caregivers, you can choose your own doctor ...

Marty Stevens Heebner:
So important. So how does Call-Light work?

Courtney Hogenson:
So Call-Light is a double-sided healthcare marketplace. As a care manager, I was often tasked with building these teams of caregivers and nurses for patients for short-term or long-term care, and I typically would go to a registry, or an agency, and sometimes it would be awesome. Sometimes they'd send me a nurse with a pulse, and I'd be like, "You can't send that to this house," because I would be held responsible for each and every person that came in, but got to the point where I couldn't trust other people to do it, so I had to do it myself, and so Call-Light basically came to me when I was hiring my first part-time nanny for my son six and a half years ago. I remember I found this wonderful girl through a Facebook group, like a mom's group or something, but I said, "I have to check your references. You could be an ax murderer, I don't know," and she said, "Can I give you my review page from this babysitting site?," and I was like, "What is she talking about?," and so she gives me this rating and review sheet from UrbanSitter, and I loved it.
I was like, "Huh, somebody needs to do this for nursing so that people can hire nurses at home. This is so needed. This is going to help so many people." I had a newborn. I was like, "Somebody's going to do this. Someone's going to come up with this," and the pandemic happened, and it's, "Oh my gosh, we need this more than ever now," and so Call-Light is this tool, this platform where people can post a job.
I need someone to help three days a week with grandma for these specialties, so a daughter could do that, post the job, and then all these different nurses and clinicians can apply for it and say, "Oh, that's something I'm interested in. It's not too far from me. Those hours would work with me," and they negotiate like, "Hey, here's what I want to pay. Here's my hours. Here's what I can do," so really, what we're trying to do is trying to get rid of that middleman that puts so much cost on top of it, because it's 30 to 50% on top, and so in this way, if you have a nurse or clinician that's really good, they're going to be getting these ratings and these reviews over and over, and it's going to be tracking how many repeat clients, how many this, how many that.
You may have the best team of nurses or caregivers for your loved ones that works right in that moment, but what if a car won't start? What if one of them gets sick? What do you do? Would you go back to the hospital? You bring in a totally new person?
So to me, it's like there's four million nurses in the United States, and not all of them want to be working in a hospital, working 12-hour shifts, nights, holidays, weekends. Nurses that have done in-home care, private duty, they wonder, "How can I get more of these jobs?" I get to work one-on-one with someone where they want to be, and this person recognizes that they need my help so that they can stay home, and this person wants my help, and this person needs my help. It's a win.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
That's so brilliant because you found the need, you found the void, and you found the solution.

Courtney Hogenson:
That's the first business you start. I was a nurse, and then I started a home care company, 'cause I thought, "Gosh, there's so many gaps in our care system. People are always asking me as a nurse, 'How can we help them in that transition to home?,'" and so I kind of went down that route, learned a lot, so much.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
That was Heal at Home. That was Heal at Home. I remember, that's when I first met you. We've known each other for about 10 years now.

Courtney Hogenson:
That was the first business. I didn't have a kid. I was like bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, but it was such a great experience, and I think these other doors started opening, 'cause I was really great at what I did and I loved being a nurse and being in charge of all these caregivers, and I was then the director of nursing, but if the client was in a hospital or going to a doctor's office, I started to recognize the value of being there with them and being the patient quarterback, that, "Hey, let's make sure that this medication got picked up at the pharmacy. Let's make sure it got put in the pill box. Let's make sure that they're checking the blood pressure," and I just recognized the continuity of care that I was able to provide, and then families just kept saying, "Gosh, if we could hire someone like you to go to all of their appointments, to manage all the caregivers," so that's when I became a care manager. Those voids keep coming up, and I need to help these people.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
We know the healthcare system is a mess, and it's difficult, it's scary. I think the world knows it's ridiculous and that people literally can go bankrupt taking care of people.

Courtney Hogenson:
The private duty registry that I had in LA and the care management, not everyone could afford that, and that's what was tough. I tried to do what I could, and I never left anybody like, "Oh, you can't afford my services, I can't help you." I would always try to help them as much as we could, but I wanted to make it so that more people could get help, because sometimes you don't need a nurse 24/7, round-the-clock. Sometimes you just need someone for a week, or someone's a newly diabetic patient, and they just need a little bit more than what home health will offer, because home health, even if you qualify for it. It's just a few, short visits for a few weeks, and that's it. It's great to have it, but you don't know when they're showing up, who it's going to be.
You can't plan your life around that, so with Call-Light, I really want nurses to be able to ... Just like when you're in the hospital, and someone pushes the Call-Light, you can go and help them. If you're available, you can say, "You know what? I'm going to go help that person Because they're five minutes from me," or what have you.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
I remember when you had Heal at Home home healthcare, and this is what you do when you're a business owner, one of the caregivers at the last minute couldn't show up, so I remember you said, "I'm putting on my scrubs and going and doing the shift." I think you mentioned that after your shift, they said, "Oh my God, why can't we have somebody like you all the time?," your skill as a nurse and being able to translate to people. For example, you mentioned a G tube and a PEG before. What are those, 'cause I don't know?

Courtney Hogenson:
A G tube is something that goes into your nose and your gastro area, and then a PEG goes into the side of your stomach.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Somebody who understands that and also knows the perils of having those things, if they're not looked after properly, and that's something a nurse knows.

Courtney Hogenson:
Just going on those shifts. Those are some of the most memorable ones, when I put on the pair of scrubs and had to show up, 'cause they needed help, and I thought, "You know what? Today's my day. I'm going to go." I just wanted to make sure they were taken care of and they could stay home.
I feel like if you really have never walked in those shoes, as a business owner, it's hard. I always had such an easier time to be like, "I know what that's like, and this is what I would do if I were you," and it's hard. It's not for everybody, and it takes a village too. You could have the best nurse in the world or the best caregiver in the world, but they can't be everywhere 24/7, so you have to find allies, and you have to find other people to help.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
And the experts at each area.

Courtney Hogenson:
What are the odds, and what does the usual course look like for someone in their 80's going through this? They don't talk about it, and they should.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
That generation, they revered doctors, and it wasn't the same kind of system that we have now, where it's just a conveyor belt, and often, as you know all too well, they're afraid to ask questions. They feel they're being disrespectful, and also, if they don't know what to ask, what are the kinds of questions people should ask a doctor? Ideally, take an advocate.

Courtney Hogenson:
Yeah, that's what I would say. I just think of the difference. I noticed when a caregiver would go to a doctor's appointment, or when I would go, or a daughter. It's great to have anybody. Taking notes is the biggest thing.
Have someone record it, if the doctor's okay with that, and asking questions. Before you even go into any doctor's appointment, you need to have a list of all your current meds, who prescribes them, exactly what you take. If you take vitamin D every day, put that on there. If you take a multivitamin, put that on there. Even if it's over-the-counter or a nutritional supplement, put it on there, because things can interact that you don't know about, or something can make something work even more.
You need to be in charge of your master medication list. Look how many times things get lost in translation from one system to another, to the pharmacy, when you pick up the wrong dose. We're humans. We make a lot of errors and-

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Computers also make mistakes.

Courtney Hogenson:
Oh, yeah. You also need people to be able to ask questions like, "Hey, why am I taking this medication?" I found that when I did these master medication lists for patients, I would always put, "This is so you don't pee so much at night." Put it in terms they understand.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Translate it, and that's something you're great at, and you can find the nurses who are great at that too. I know you're big on getting people to plan for later life, or it's not even later life. What if you're in a car accident, you wind up in a coma?

Courtney Hogenson:
What if you're Britney Spears, and you have a lot of money and a lot of people that depend on you? Wouldn't it be nice to pick who's in charge of you?

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Yes, it would be. Took a court case for her, but finally. I remember a story you once told me, I think it was after your first shift at UCLA's ICU, and you saw these critically ill patients, and you went home, talked to your husband, and ...

Courtney Hogenson:
I printed out an advance healthcare directive for both of us. I just went to the state of California, advance healthcare directive, printed it out, it was a couple of pages long, and said, "I do or do not want this to happen to me." You basically are saying, "When I want you to pull the plug, don't keep me alive for 50 years in a coma." So I filled that out, and then we walked over to our neighbor's house, had him sign as a witness. We both did those right then and there because I was actually in a nursing school rotation, and I was in the ICU, and it was two youngish patients who nobody wanted to be the one to say, "We don't think they're going to recover," but they were both comatose, brain-dead. You pray for a miracle, and look, miracles happen, but it was not very likely that they were ever going to wake up or have any sort of meaningful life, and no one wanted to be the person to say, "Let's not try everything."
So both of these patients were getting sent to get trached and PEGed, so they were getting an airway put in here so they could have a ventilator, breathe for them, and they were getting PEGed so nutrition can go in through their stomach, and then they both got sent off to a skilled nursing facility. The families said if we had had something in writing or if we had ever talked about it. We just never talked about it, and so I saw that as where you go, when you don't talk about it and nothing's in writing, 'cause you can't just have it in writing and you can't just talk about it. You have to do both. Well, and some people will write in their advance healthcare directive, like you ask them, "What's super important to you?"
"As long as I can sit and watch baseball and eat chocolate, that's enough for me," and so for that person, put that in there. As long as they can still do that, keep treating them, but once they lose the ability to do whatever it is that's super important to them, that's their quality of life. That's their choice.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Yeah, it really is.

Courtney Hogenson:
I remember some of my doctor friends, we would talk about, "Oh, you're on the list to pull the plug for me. If you have to trip over the cord, you better pull that plug. If you don't, if I suffer for years and years, I will haunt you. I will find a way," and we joke about it, "But I just want you to know, this is definitely what I want."

Marty Stevens Heebner:
It's so important. The statistics say that about a third of new entrepreneurial ventures are being started by people who are over 50, and there are multitudes, including younger people, who are launching endeavors to serve later life and all the different issues involved. It's a challenge to become an entrepreneur. I don't know if you hear this as much as I do, you'll be at a party or something, you're meeting somebody and they say, "Oh, that's so great. You can make your own hours," and I always say, "24/7, I make my own hours." Yeah, it's just great.

Courtney Hogenson:
There's definitely good things about it, but it can be lonely too, and I think that's why we found other entrepreneurs. As women, it was so nice to find a group of people that understood, 'cause I think people have these conceptions of, "Oh, if you have a business, you're already super successful, you're already rich." No. I didn't pay myself for the first couple of years. You have no idea what it's like until you start a business, and even though it's successful, doesn't mean you're making any money.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Yeah, you and I. We've talked a lot about the challenges and everything, but there's a term called the loneliness of leadership. You're married, you have this adorable son, and you have your friends and everything like that, and yet, you're the one who has to make the decisions. People can give you all kinds of information, but ultimately, you have to say, "We need to do this," and it's a risk, and that's the loneliness of leadership, and that's what keeps people up till 3:00 AM and you got the squirrels going around in your brain.

Courtney Hogenson:
I think that's always going to be there, and I think the thing that's helped me is I just try to refocus on like, "Why am I doing this? Why am I choosing to do this?" It's funny, I didn't go into nursing to become a business person or to become an entrepreneur. I went into nursing 'cause I just wanted to help people. I left Hollywood.
I was like, "Oh, this wasn't what I thought it was going to be. It sucks."

Marty Stevens Heebner:
It does.

Courtney Hogenson:
I'll never become richer, famous, or all these things, but I will know that my time here was spent helping people. I'm making a difference every day, and then finding out, being a nurse, there's so many things I could do outside of the hospital, like a legal nurse consultant. I could be an advocate, I could be so many things, and I just wanted to help other nurses figure out how to do that. Being an entrepreneur, it's not for everybody, but it's-

Marty Stevens Heebner:
It's in our blood, and it's really great to go home at the end of the day and know that you really eased a burden for someone.

Courtney Hogenson:
And selfishly, who's going to take care of my parents, and my aunts and uncles? Who's going to take care of us? We don't create these systems. No one else is going to do it.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
That's so true. I was kind of like, "Stop complaining and just do it." We're talking about planning and how important that is. It's also very important to sign your documents.

Courtney Hogenson:
And make sure everybody knows where it is, and that will save you. I mean, there've been people who didn't know that had an advance healthcare directive, and they're in court fighting over the care, and I remember an advance healthcare directive came out of a safe, an accountant, or somebody found it, and was like, "Oh, no, he actually chose who he wants to be in charge," and he was like, "Thank you for having done that," and telling somebody where that was, because it's saved them, I think years and probably millions of dollars.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
I bring this up basically every episode, about planning, because it's the gift you give those you'll leave behind. The wonderful thing about you is that you're not just a patient advocate, but you're really an advocate for healthcare workers. What can all of us do to support healthcare workers and nurses, who we came finally to really appreciate during the pandemic? What can we do now that we're getting past the pandemic to really support them?

Courtney Hogenson:
I think the current thing you can really do to help support nurses and healthcare workers is ... There's this initiative. Most people don't know this, but the billing system for nursing goes back 100 years, and a nurse's services, unlike a doctor's, a doctor can bill for his or her services with a billing number, NPI. When you go into the hospital, your nursing services are put on your bill like a box of tissues. Like it's just part of the room charge.
It's like they're not even treated like the professionals that they are. I just think there are so many different levels. There's nurse anesthetists, there's nurse practitioners, there's all sorts of things. It's been in that place for so long, and I think people don't even realize that it's still like that, so now, what we're trying to do is we're trying to get nurses to have their own billing codes, and there's a commission that has started. We're just trying to make nurses get the professional due that they should be able to bill for their services.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
That is awful. A nurse next to a box of tissues on an invoice.

Courtney Hogenson:
Yeah.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
With all that training and all the trauma they see, all those patients and the families, they're so vital, and they're the ones who the people see all the time in hospitals.

Courtney Hogenson:
Unless they start to do that and nurses have their own billing codes, just like all these other types of therapists, then people are going to be able to choose their own nurses. "Oh, I want to choose my home nurse, and I'm going to contract with her directly." Right now, we're doing all private pay, but at some point in the future, when nurses have their own billing codes and their NPIs, you're-

Marty Stevens Heebner:
What are NPIs, National Provider Identifier or something like that?

Courtney Hogenson:
Yeah, that's a way that people can get billing for Medicare, for Medicaid. When you have something like that, you don't have to go through a registry or an agency, just how you can choose your own doctors.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
And the great thing with Call-Light is that you can choose the nurse or clinician that you want to work with, and I just think that's such a brilliant idea. I'm so glad you've done it. Thank you so much for being with me, and thank you for all the vital information, for everything you do.

Courtney Hogenson:
Thank you, Marty.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Thank you so much for listening to How to Move Your Mom (and still be on speaking terms afterward). Please visit howtomoveyourmom.com for more information about this episode and for additional podcast episodes featuring other extraordinary guests and conversations. Until next time, this is your very grateful host, Marty Stevens-Heebner.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
I took a poll recently on social media to find out if you'd prefer an episode on later life dating or later life divorce. And surprisingly, the vote was split right down the middle, so I decided to find an expert in family law to talk about what to do when you're getting serious of someone and what to do if things fall apart. Stay tuned to hear Attorney and Expert Mediator Richard Sperling share his expertise.
Moving your mom or your dad or yourself isn't just about moving things from one place to another. It is much more complicated than that, as are so many things having to do with later life. How To Move Your Mom (and Still be on Speaking Terms Afterward) provides in-depth conversations with professionals, older adults, and their family members who share their stories with warmth, understanding, and humor. I'm your host, Marty Stevens-Heebner, and here you'll find answers to many of your questions as well as different perspectives that I hope will inform and inspire you.
Richard, it's so lovely to have you here today.

Richard Sperling:
Happy to be here, Marty.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Family Law Attorney Richard Sperling works with clients throughout California who are transitioning in and out of relationships. In addition to divorce, Richard's practice focuses on relationship agreements such as pre and postmarital agreements, cohabitation agreements, and so on. Richard is a certified mediator who seeks resolution wherever possible to keep his clients out of court. His expertise in real estate and business law comes in very handy in his family law practice and at one time he served as counsel for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. So impressive. He's also taught a multitude of law courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and when he is not practicing law, he loves sailing and playing his guitar. Hopefully, Richard, you're not steering and strumming at the same time.

Richard Sperling:
No, the guitar is put away, Marty.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Just thought we were safe out there on the water.

Richard Sperling:
I'm much better at talking than I am playing.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
So what's your favorite memory of your grandparents?

Richard Sperling:
My grandmother was voted Beverly Hills' Mother of the Year and they had a big party for her at the Beverly Hilton and all sorts of movie stars came, so I was probably 15. I remember going to that with my family and we dressed up and it was quite an accomplishment for a woman who came over on the boat from Europe and didn't know anybody and had no education. It was a great party and then we went home and she made pickles for all of us, so it was a fun memory. She was a great questioner. If she sat you down, there would be a hundred questions. At the end of the conversation, she would know all about you.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
That must have been great preparation for you as an attorney, watching your grandmother interview people.

Richard Sperling:
I suppose I took after my grandmother and going into that, my cousin on the other hand became a physician and you know what they say about lawyers? Lawyers are doctors that can't stand the sight of blood.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
That's a new one on me. I like that. You're already talking about the law and family law is so complex not only in terms of the statutes but also the emotions. What kind of situations do you wind up dealing with?

Richard Sperling:
It used to be people calling me up and saying, "I've been married seven years, eight years, 10 years, and we're growing apart and I think I need a divorce." Nowadays, my practice is different and I think in family law we're seeing some new wrinkles and one of them people who are living together, moving in together with without the benefit of marriage, that's becoming very popular and there's some significant legal ramifications of that. The other situation I'm seeing a lot of are people in their sixties and seventies and even eighties who are saying, "I'm very aware of the time I have left. I'm not happy. I'm leaving my spouse and I'm going to go date or I'm going back in with my college sweetheart and we're going to get married."
I'm seeing a lot of what we call grey divorce and people just getting together in new relationships in their later years and that poses some different problems. People have estates, they have wealth put together, they have commitments to their kids and they're leaving their spouse maybe after a 30 or 40 year marriage, which is sometimes sad, but sometimes people are also relieved and we have people moving in together and that poses some new challenges also.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
There is a lot of grey divorce going on. There have to be specific issues, one of which you brought up, that they have property, there's inheritance involved. What kinds of things go into a pre or postmarital agreement or a cohabitation agreement for people who are older?

Richard Sperling:
Let's start with the postmarital agreements. People who are already married, sometimes it's a second marriage. Let's say a husband has a house, he marries, the wife moves into the house, and as they get older the wife starts thinking, "What happens if my husband passes away?" He's got a will and a trust, he's promised the house to his kids, he's promised the wealth to his kids, and she's thinking, "Where's my security? What happens if he passes? Am I going to get kicked out from this house we've been living in for 10 years the day after he passes away? I've been taking care of him for all this time." So we often put a postmarital agreement together with the cooperation of the children and that agreement will say something like, "If I pass away, you can live in this house for four years and then it'll go to my kids."
So we try and adapt that second marriage to the entire family and it helps the entire family get along. That would be a situation where a postmarital agreement's very helpful. Sometimes we're doing a premarital agreement for people who are older. They have their own homes, they have their own investments, and we want to clarify what's in their estate and that each party's estate's going to remain their own separate property, and is there going to be a commitment to care for the other person in the event of death or divorce? The interplay between an estate plan and a postmarital agreement or a premarital agreement is really important because if I promise certain things in my estate plan and my trust and my will to a spouse or to my children, generally, wills and trusts can be modified or canceled, but if I put together a premarital agreement or a postmarital agreement with my spouse and we sign it, that is a binding agreement and cannot be canceled or modified by just one spouse.
So a premarital agreement or postmarital agreement is a valuable estate planning tool and we often use those agreements in conjunction with estate plan and I'm frequently bringing in my client's estate planning attorney so that we can coordinate that. The premarital agreements are agreements we put together before people get married. Postmarital agreements are agreements we put together after people get married, but the difference is critical and it's a fine legal point, but we have a famous case that tell us what we need to know about those two agreements. It's the Burkle case involving famous entrepreneur from here in LA called Ron Burkle. He ended up buying Ralphs and other grocery stores and amassing a big fortune. These days, he's a movie producer and he owns baseball teams and hockey teams.
His marriage went sideways, but he wanted to reconcile with his wife, so they put together a postmarital agreement and that agreement said, "Okay, whatever we own now, we own as community property and if we split, I will pay you, my wife, a million dollars a year in support for every year that we've been married and I'll pay you $30 million cash, but should our reconciliation not work and we get divorced, whatever I earn, whatever I acquire from our divorce forward will be my separate property." Their reconciliation failed. They got divorced and the court Mrs. Burkle took the position that their agreement had to be exactly 50-50, their agreement had to be fair to both of them or it was not binding, and that litigation went all the way up to our state Supreme Court and that decision said, "Yes. If people are married and they put together a postmarital agreement, they do owe each other complete disclosure, complete transparency, and neither spouse can gain an unfair advantage in that postmarital agreement."
The court said, "This post marital agreement is fair to both parties. It may not be exactly equal, but neither party gained an unfair advantage." And what we learned from the Burkle case is that a postmarital agreement, while it can be slightly not equal, there is a duty to treat each other fairly. So postmarital agreements have to be drafted and negotiated very carefully.
In a premarital agreement, we don't have those same duties because we're not yet married, so we can put a premarital agreement together that's not 50-50, that seems to be unfair to one spouse or the other. We might have a wealthy entertainer. I'm working on one right now where one of the parties is on a popular TV show and that actor's making about a million dollars every episode. In a premarital agreement, before we're married, we don't have this fiduciary duty and a lot of times, especially in the entertainment industry, an actor will say, "Okay, let's get married, but let's have an agreement that I'm not going to pay any spousal support if our marriage fails," and it is possible to waive spousal support in a premarital agreement. We don't have a fiduciary duty in a premarital agreement we do in a postmarital agreement. So that's an important distinction between the two agreements.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Can you define what you're meaning by a fiduciary responsibility? Because I don't think everybody will understand.

Richard Sperling:
In the legal space, there are some relationships between people that are relationships of trust and confidence and we call them a fiduciary duty. It comes from back in the days where the knights would pledge their lives and their total loyalty to the king and we got the word fiduciary from that historical time. I might be a doctor in a doctor-patient relationship, I might be an attorney, or I might be a spouse, and what that means is I owe total and first loyalty to the person I'm a fiduciary to. I owe complete honesty. It's a relationship of trust and I'm not going to take advantage of my fiduciary partner. And until we're married, we don't owe that fiduciary duty to the person that we may be living with, that we may be engaged to, but after we marry, we're fiduciaries at that point and that's why if spouses get into a divorce and one spouse hides income or hides assets, that's a breach of fiduciary duty and there're severe penalties for that breach.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
That's fascinating, especially the historical part. What are some of the difference between a pre and postmarital agreement versus a cohabitation agreement?

Richard Sperling:
Cohabitation agreements are becoming more and more prevalent, especially in California because we don't have common law marriage, but we do have the Marvin case, which is a unique part of our law coming from the actor Lee Marvin and his relationship with a woman that he lived with. Her name was Michelle Triola. She was an extra on the movie set and when Lee Marvin met her, he split with his wife and moved in with her. That Marvin case gave us what we call alimony. When they split up, Michelle alleged that Lee made her a verbal promise that whatever money he earned and whatever property he acquired, while they were living together, would be half hers and that he would support her for the rest of their lives after they broke up.
They litigated that issue all the way up to our state Supreme Court and the decision tells us that if you convinced the court that a verbal promise was made, that promise is binding in California. People who move in together, maybe they're only together for a few months and maybe one of the parties is an entrepreneur or a real estate broker or agent who makes a big commission, that can create a significant claim on the part of the other party. That can be devastating. So in a cohabitation agreement generally would say, "We're moving in together. Here's what you own, here's what I own, and we're going to keep our property separate, and a verbal promise between us is not going to be binding. For there to be an obligation to support each other should our relationship end, that promise has to be in writing."
That's particularly important for people who are not only making a lot of money, but sometimes grandpa is being cared for by a caregiver and grandpa has amassed the fortune and the caregiver sometimes will move in with grandpa, so sometimes the family will go to grandpa and say, "Let's put an agreement together that says there's not going to be a verbal promise between you and your caregiver." So we're doing a lot of those.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
You and I both have a friend who's a terrific estate planning attorney, Elise Lampert, but the way she describes what she does is, "When grandma marries the pool boy, call me."

Richard Sperling:
Or call before they marry.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
So long as you're aware beforehand.

Richard Sperling:
Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
People may say, "Oh, he doesn't want to talk about finances." Well, the thing is, if you can't talk about finances before getting married or living together, that's a huge warning sign.

Richard Sperling:
It really is, and it's a fortunate byproduct of what we do with these agreements. It forces each fiance to sit down with each other and talk about things that they really should be talking about. "How are we going to pay our living expenses? Are we going to share our income? Are we going to have a joint account where we pool our funds?" It's difficult to think that a marriage is going to work if people can't talk about how they're going to pay their way after they get married. There are a lot of religious institutions that if you want to marry at the temple or the church or wherever, they'll put you through a process of interviewing and explore these kinds of questions and require you to talk about them. Some attorneys will say, "You have to see that your fiance is current in their taxes or you should marry them." And they'll want to put in the premarital agreement, "We've shared each other's income tax returns," and some people don't want to do that, so that can be an issue when we put these premarital agreements together.
You certainly don't want to get in a position where you marry somebody and they earn money. That money is arguably community property and the IRS will come after the other spouse if the earning spouse disappears. We urge people to think about disclosing their finances and giving evidence to the other that they're current with their income taxes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
So important, I think of it as a whole marital plan. You talk everything through including the possibility of the end. As you said before, all relationships end one way or another, and it's about pre or postmarital agreement, cohabitation agreement. Also, the estate plan, the trust, the healthcare directive, all of those things. I feel like they should be requirements before you really commit to each other.

Richard Sperling:
A lot of times people will marry and they won't talk about their relatives. Maybe a spouse has a sister or a brother that needs some support, that needs some care. What are we going to going to do if, God forbid, there's an accident or an illness? To what extent are we going to help them? Are we going to subsidize them? Might they be moving into our home if they need care?

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Thinking about it, what if you are a spouse who has no children and you marry somebody with children, you take care of your spouse who is the one to pass first, but they need care at the end of their lives and all those expenses. Who's going to take care of you? That's a big question.

Richard Sperling:
And sometimes the kids need care. Sometimes a child gets into drugs or unemployed or goes through a bad divorce and needs some emotional care. Are we going to move that child into our home for a while? Are we going to help them financially? And maybe one of the spouses might be thinking, "Wait a minute, if we pay $50,000 to this child every year, where's my security?" I did a postmarital agreement recently for an older attorney who had four sons and in his eighties, he married a woman who was in her eighties and after a while she said, "You're helping your sons. You're intending to leave your estate to your sons. What happens to me if you die?" So we had to engage an estate planning attorney. We had sessions with their four sons. Some of them were happy to make an adjustment in their father's estate plan to care for his new wife, but some of the sons were very unhappy with that and they felt, "This is my father. You shouldn't be supporting your new wife out of money that I should be inheriting." So we see a lot of different attitudes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Well, when you live that long, it's not unusual, whether you're male or female, to have more than one marriage because sometimes you are widowed. My dad was widowed when he was only 65. He never remarried. Mom was the love of his life and he made it to 90, but he could have remarried.

Richard Sperling:
Wow. I think it's very interesting, especially these days where people are in their eighties and even nineties and they don't want to be alone, that they don't want to live with somebody without the benefit of marriage. So we see a lot of 80-year-old and 90-year-old people saying, "We're going to get married."

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Love at all ages. It's all around. And speaking of love, when you're working through all these frankly difficult conversations as you're making these agreements, how do you keep the love in that as you're putting this together?

Richard Sperling:
That's part of the service that I try and provide, and that is keeping a premarital or postmarital agreement as simple and romantic as possible. That's an important factor when somebody is deciding on an attorney to work with. Some attorneys are not people oriented. Some attorneys are more aggressive. Some attorneys treat a premarital agreement like a real estate contract. I've seen real problems occur when the attorneys don't approach the situation carefully, but it's very rare to see a planned marriage not occur because of the premarital agreement. They're often very necessary. People these days are sophisticated enough to see, "This marriage is an important step we're both making and we have both of our estates to deal with." There's a lot less stigma than there used to be with premarital agreements.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
You mentioned that there are some techniques you use to keep people from getting angry or falling out of love with each other.

Richard Sperling:
Well, a premarital agreement or a postmarital agreement can be an opportunity to express love to the other person. Sometimes we'll say, "In the event I die or we divorce, I want to take care of you and I want this to be a commitment that I'm making you in writing that you can rely on. I'm going to provide you with this life insurance policy. I'm going to provide you with this amount of spousal support every month for this amount of time in the event we divorce." So we can formulate a proposal in a way that's romantic and assures the other party, "I don't want this to be a verbal commitment that we might forget about," and the premarital agreement becomes, "I might call it an instrument of love, of care," as opposed to something that some people feel is an advanced divorce judgment.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
It can really be a beautiful thing on both sides, and you really find out what each person's priorities are. Often that can be a lovely thing. Sometimes you see a side that you haven't seen before and may change your mind. Maya Angelou, she's so quotable. "When people show you who they really are, believe them the first time."

Richard Sperling:
If we need to take a position that seems unromantic, let's say we have a wealthy fiance and that fiance wants to say, "I want you to waive spousal support." I'll discuss this with my client and I'll say, "If you need to talk about this with your fiance that both parties are going to waive spousal support, blame it on the attorney, blame it on me."

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
It's all so important and complicated. It could feel overwhelming. So I see why some people become reticent about it, but I think it's so important to talk to somebody like you and get a sense of what's important and why this is so necessary, these kinds of agreements.

Richard Sperling:
And again, we can simplify it. It doesn't have to be very complicated. We can keep it romantic. Most family law lawyers will not do premarital agreements or postmarital agreements or cohabitation agreements because they are complex and they need to be done right. There's some famous cases where the fiances actually signed the wrong drafts of these agreements. There's a recent case, the Esra case, where Mrs. Esra signed the wrong draft, and nevertheless, the court imposed that draft on her after her husband died, and his real estate, instead of going to her, they discovered that they had signed a draft of a premarital agreement that actually gave the house to his daughter from a prior marriage. She filed a lawsuit and said, "We signed the wrong draft." And the court said, "Too bad, we're going to hold you to what you signed."

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
It's a contract.

Richard Sperling:
It's a contract and you should have read it before you signed it. It's important to hire an attorney who has experience with these agreements.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
And who not only knows the emotions of a situation like this, but also knows how to navigate those and help their clients navigate those emotions and challenges.

Richard Sperling:
Very true, because again, lawyers who are good with people can help them put the agreements together and that sends them off with a lot more understanding and certainty.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
You're a certified mediator and I know you are just splendid when it comes to understanding people's emotions. You have a gentle and wonderful sense of humor and somehow you always seem to be able to maintain calm. I'm sure there are times when you don't, but professionally certainly.

Richard Sperling:
This seems to be a calling for me because I enjoy the people aspect of it and I think that's why I transition from business and real estate into family laws. I like getting to know people and seeing what they need. That's a lot different from reading contracts and helping people via a piece of real estate or sell a business. I enjoy family law. I was in business and real estate for many years and this is something I'm comfortable doing. Sometimes at the end of the day I look forward to a glass of wine. It's true. But I enjoy people and I enjoy helping them solve problems. And these agreements avoid problems. They avoid conflict, they avoid litigation.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
I feel like once people have put this together and talked about all the hard issues, what a relief to then go into the marriage or moving in together because you've talked about the rough stuff.

Richard Sperling:
It's often a relief. Everybody that comes into my office says, "My partner and I are never going to break up. I know we're never going to split up. I know we're not part of this 50% of people that break up, but I guess I should do this premarital agreement." And people fall in love. They put the agreement together and they move on, and it's great to help them do it.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
And you are happily married. Your wife, Elaine, is so wonderful.

Richard Sperling:
Thank you. I do feel happily married and I do feel lucky.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
What made you move from real estate and business law toward family law?

Richard Sperling:
When people ask me what distinguishes you from other family law attorneys, one of the things I can point to is my experience as a business attorney or a real estate attorney. I was teaching business law and real estate at Cal State Northridge. One of the local law schools called me up and said, "Would you be interested in teaching at our law school?" And I said, "Sure. I can come teach business law. I can come teach real estate." And the dean said, "The class we're hoping you'll teach is community property and family law." For some reason I was intrigued and I said, "Okay, I'll give it a try." And I came to the law school and started teaching and I realized that this is an area dealing with people and human emotion, and that's really my calling more than issues regarding buying and selling property or entering into business contracts. So this is what I do.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
What kinds of questions should people ask a family law attorney they're considering hiring?

Richard Sperling:
They should ask the attorney how long they've been in their practice and how often they've performed the task they're asking the attorney to perform. "Is this your first post-marital agreement? How often do you work with cohabitation agreements? What is this going to cost? Are you comfortable speaking with my estate planning attorney and coordinating with her?" And then one of the questions you asked me, Marty, is a great question for your family law attorney, which is, "What strategies can we use to keep our agreement simple and romantic so we don't become angry with each other? Tell us what your approach is."

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Is the person you're talking to, the attorney you're interviewing, receptive to what your needs are? And do you get the sense that they're listening?

Richard Sperling:
Each client should have an attorney that they're comfortable with and make sure they're comfortable with their lawyer's style. So if you're a person that wants to have a frank and close relationship with your lawyer and you go to your lawyer's office and you only meet with the lawyer's assistant and you're not comfortable with that, it's okay to switch lawyers. We have a saying in negotiation, which is, "Let's not just talk about your position, let's talk about the reasons for your position." Getting underneath and finding out why are you taking the position you're taking can be so important. Often I'll get on the phone with the other attorney and say, "I know there's an issue about who gets the dog."

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Yes.

Richard Sperling:
And they have a divorce. People will say, "He can have the house, he can have the Ferrari, but I get the dog if we split up. Over my dead body is my spouse going to get my dog." So it's important that we get on the phone with the other lawyer and explain the reasons for their positions. We need to help them enter into an agreement they're both comfortable with that they can move forward with. And same thing in a divorce context.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
What do you wish people knew about what you do that they probably don't know?

Richard Sperling:
It's important that people realize that a process between people that care for each other that are warming a relationship or transitioning out of a relationship need not be a battle. It need not be embarrassing or difficult, that an attorney can help them move through the process in a way that's not as expensive as they may think it might be. A lot of people are afraid, "My fiance and I are going to end up angry with each other." We can put a premarital agreement together that's going to enable you to take a deep breath and enjoy your marriage and enjoy the rest of your life. I'd like people to know that some people do get divorced. As people look around and see how difficult some of these divorces are, how much money some people spend on them, and how damaging it is for some children. We can avoid that by putting an agreement together that if they do divorce, then it becomes a simple process because all these issues have been negotiated in advance.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Especially when you're older, you should have a sense of what really matters in life and what your priorities are. And I would say if you're planning on cohabitating or especially getting married and your fiance doesn't want to even discuss or talk about a premarital agreement or even a postmarital agreement, that's really telling, but you talked about getting underneath. In a way, you're part therapist, Richard, helping them talk through these difficult issues. There might be something that that person who's reticent didn't even realize was dictating, they're recalcitrant. And even in my work, people want to keep things because of deeper reasons than what they're actually saying. The deeper we can go, I think the better.

Richard Sperling:
You make such an important point. When we talk about people who are older that are getting married, moving in together, or getting divorced, there are such important considerations for that. Oftentimes when we get older, we're more fragile or we're more vulnerable. A divorce or a separation can be more difficult for people when they're older. Oftentimes, there's more at stake. Sometimes people are frail or less healthy and a difficult divorce can really impact their lives.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
What's the toughest part of your job?

Richard Sperling:
Sometimes family law lawyers are using a case or a matter to make money or sometimes they're oblivious to how much conflict they're causing. Sometimes they don't see the needs of their own client. So my most difficult part of my job is dealing with a difficult or an unprofessional attorney on the other side. Thank goodness most attorneys are okay to work with.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Richard Sperling, family law attorney and brilliant mediator. Thank you so much for spending time with me today.

Richard Sperling:
Marty, it's been a pleasure. I've learned a lot from speaking with you.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
I learned a lot too. And you can find Richard's information on our website, howtomoveyourmom.com. Thank you so much for listening to How to Move Your Mom (and Still be on Speaking Terms Afterward.) Please visit howtomoveyourmom.com for more information about this episode and for additional podcast episodes featuring other extraordinary guests and conversations. Until next time, this is your very grateful host, Marty Stevens-Heebner.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Probate courts are insanely busy places, and the cases there are complex and notoriously emotional, because they often involve contested estates, as well as fraud and elder abuse. If you find yourself heading to probate court, working with a top-notch attorney who specializes in probate is crucial. And today, I get to talk with one of the finest, Scott Rahn, one of the founding partners of RMO LLP. I promise you'll be fascinated.
Moving your mom or your dad, or yourself, isn't just about moving things from one place to another. It is much more complicated than that, as are so many things having to do with later life. How to Move Your Mom and Still Be on Speaking Terms Afterward provides in-depth conversations with professionals, older adults and their family members, who share their stories with warmth, understanding and humor. I'm your host, Marty Stevens-Heebner, and here you'll find answers to many of your questions, as well as different perspectives that I hope will inform and inspire you. Scott, thank you so much for joining me today.

Scott Rahn:
Pleasure to be here.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Scott is very impressive. He is the founding partner of RMO LLP, a national probate litigation law firm focused solely on probate disputes, and we'll go into all those kinds of things in a moment. The news media loves Scott, and for very good reason, he's very articulate. He's been featured on the Today Show, the BBC and in Vanity Fair magazine, and that's just to name a few. And he has so many accolades, and here's just the short list. Scott's made the Best Lawyers in America list, and the LA Times called him a legal visionary, and I think that's the most remarkable one, being a visionary. I'm just going to start with asking you about your favorite memory of your grandparents.

Scott Rahn:
They were so influential in my life. I spent every summer, almost every break, weekend holidays, with my grandparents on their dairy farm. One of the many things that stands out is hours upon hours of playing cards, all different kinds of games with my grandma and my grandpa, but my grandma would get so flustered when we would win that she would call us names. Big pig, sow, were some of my favorites, but such amazing memories. I'm very lucky to have been so close with them for so long.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Competitive grandma, I get it.

Scott Rahn:
Apple, tree, as some would say.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
I think that's right. My mom was a wizard at gin rummy. So fun. I really want to give people a sense of what sets probate litigation apart from other legal matters involving older adults and their families.

Scott Rahn:
Probate litigation is essentially any dispute that involves inheritance. So, anything that involves passing your affairs, your estate, your legacy to your loved ones, whether it's a will or a trust that comes into play, whatever the mechanism is, somebody thinks they're entitled to something that somebody else disagrees with. We come in and we help the parties and help the court understand what's really going on here, what's supposed to happen, and get the case to a result, whether it's through negotiated settlement, mediation, perhaps with a retired probate judge, or, when necessary, taking the case to trial. We are true blue trial lawyers, specializing only in probate litigation matters.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Just so folks know who aren't as familiar with attorneys and that sort of thing, litigators fight for you. It's not like drawing up an estate plan or putting together a trust. Some people do both, but Scott and his amazing firm, RMO, they go and fight for you. When it's time to be in front of a judge, he's there for you, and so are his colleagues.

Scott Rahn:
We get an opportunity to help people through a really difficult time in their lives, where either they've lost somebody they love, or in the case of a conservatorship or a guardianship, someone they love is compromised, and there's a problem. Something that was intended regarding their loved one or their loved one's legacy has been upset, and we get to come in, we get to hold their hand, let them know it's going to be okay because we have a plan. We've done these cases for a long time. We help develop a plan and execute on that plan to leave them in a better place than we found them. It's very rewarding. It's one of the many reasons why I love what we do.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Is there any chance we can hear about a case or two that you've worked on?

Scott Rahn:
I could blend any number of them into a single case, where you have mom or dad pass, and they have either a stepparent or there's a child who feels like they weren't provided for. They have a certain sense of entitlement, and they should have been receiving more than what they're getting, or perhaps they've done some things to ensure that they're getting more than what their fair share is. We have the opportunity to come in and dig into, what is it that Mom or Dad really wanted? And the intent of that person at the time that they created the documents that were intended to govern their estate and how it was going to be handled and distributed is really what matters.
We do the diligence, we do it early, find out what really went on here, so that we can advise our clients, so we can inform the other side, and hopefully put the case in a place where we can bring the litigation to a close sooner rather than later. There are all kinds of fun and crazy fact patterns that we see all day, every day, whether it's a will contest or a trust contest or a breach of fiduciary duty claim.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
And what does that mean? Breach of fiduciary.

Scott Rahn:
If you're somebody who's in charge of handling someone's affairs after they pass, you owe a duty to all of the people who are supposed to receive that estate, and that duty is known as a fiduciary duty, whether you're the executor of a will, or a trustee of a trust, or a conservator of a conservatorship estate. And it just means that you have to do what's in everybody else's best interest while you're managing that person's estate and affairs.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
You can't favor anybody, including yourself.

Scott Rahn:
You can't favor anyone, certainly not yourself, but you also have a duty to do what the deceased person intended you to do. We had a situation where we represented a young person whose mother passed, and had left her sister in charge of her trust, and the trust provided that her home was to go to her daughter, our client, after she passed. And for some reason, the sister, our client's aunt, didn't want to give it to her. She was going to sell it against our client's wishes. So we had the auntie suspended, and there is a removal petition pending, and we secured the house for our client.
But there are all kinds of, interesting, we'll say, decisions that people make when they're put in charge and it's often that we hear, usually from the other side, that, "I'm in charge. What I decide is what's going to happen." And yes, to a certain degree, but you're always guided by the document. It's what the person who created the document intended you to do more than it is what you want to do. Some people don't necessarily understand that, but we've got a pretty good track record of helping them get there.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Especially with anything that has value, whether it's cash, real estate, you have to act in the best interest, usually of others as opposed to yourself. But yeah, it's interesting how people miss that part sometimes.

Scott Rahn:
They do. They do.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
What's distinctive about what you do, Scott, and your law firm, with regard to probate litigation, that sets you apart from other firms who might handle it?

Scott Rahn:
I simply believe in my soul that we do a better job of taking care of people. We're oft to say here at RMO that if you take care of people, the rest takes care of itself, and our core values reflect that. The first is lead with empathy. We're here to take care of people. The second is be authentic, do the right thing every time, regardless of the consequences. The third is we're stronger together. We're here to elevate and celebrate our teammates, our clients, our communities.
And the fourth one is zealous efficacy, and it's a play on that old legal adage, zealous advocacy. Because what we've seen over the course of the past couple decades plus that we've been practicing is oftentimes you find lawyers who are zealous advocates. They're out there advocating for their client, but it doesn't always amount to efficacy, meaning, they're out there pounding the table for their client, but the results they're seeking aren't necessarily what's best for their client. So, we rail against that, and the bad lawyer jokes about the lawyers being the only ones who make any money. We really take seriously our duty to keep an eye on our client's bottom line, keep an eye on the results that we're getting for them, to really get them zealously efficacious results. Better results sooner.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
When you're working with the kind of attorney who just wants to run up their fees, and don't care if the client gets anything at the end of the day, because that happens, as opposing counsel, how do you try to move it forward so that doesn't happen?

Scott Rahn:
There are so many different tools that you can use. You can use the court's voluntary settlement officer program, and bring the parties to a third party who can help the other side understand exactly what it is they may get or may not get. You can go to a voluntary mediation with a retired probate judge who can tell the other side what they're likely to get and what it's likely to cost them, and help them understand they may not be getting the best result by pursuing the course of action that they're endeavoring upon. You can have the opportunity to sit down and negotiate with the parties, but if you've got a lawyer who's in the way, it's very difficult. Sometimes you have family members who just speak to one another and explain, "Look, we're only fighting over a couple million dollars, and if you continue down this path, we're all going to spend half of that, and is that what you really want?"

Marty Stevens Heebner:
And most people don't have a few million dollars to play with if they're inheriting, so those fees really stack up fast.

Scott Rahn:
Probably one of the most difficult parts of our job is when you find yourself on the other side of a party or an attorney, or sometimes both, who really aren't looking at this from what's going to be in the best interest of everyone involved, including them. It makes the job very difficult.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Oh, I bet it does. When someone is approaching a probate attorney, litigating attorney, what questions should they ask them to get a sense of who they are?

Scott Rahn:
I think they should ask them if this is what they primarily do. There are a number of lawyers who are filtering into this space to dabble in this space. Civil litigators, real estate litigators, PI lawyers, et cetera, just don't understand the nuances of being in probate court. It has its own set of rules, separate and apart from the general code of civil procedure, or the civil code, or any of the other codes that you might come across in a different practice area. And things don't necessarily move the same way as they do in other cases. Not at the same pace, not with the same procedures. So if you're caught up in one of these issues, I think it's really important that you make sure that the person you're working with really understands the judges, the procedure, what's going to happen, when it's going to happen, what it's going to cost to get to each stage, and really be able to walk you through what you can expect and when.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
So, somebody could say they've been doing probate litigation for five years. Is there some way to check on that? Is it with the Bar Association?

Scott Rahn:
Sure. You can ask them to pull together a case list of the cases that they've been a part of. They can blot out the parties' names if the cases are ongoing. But most of these are public filings, so most of the filings are going to be public record. Ask them, "How many cases did you handle last year? How many cases like mine did you handle last year? What were the results of those cases? When's the last time you were to trial? What were the results of your trial? Have you done appellate work?" There is a niche practice in this space of doing probate appellate work, which we also do.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
What is appellate work versus regular, I'll call it, litigation?

Scott Rahn:
If the court gives someone a ruling, a decision, that they don't like, then you have the opportunity to go to the next level of the court system, which is the appeals or appellate court. That's the process that eventually will get you to your state supreme court, and then potentially to the US Supreme Court. But you essentially get an opportunity to ask a panel of appellate justices to look at your case if you think the judge got it wrong.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
What's the toughest part of your job?

Scott Rahn:
I think the hardest part is when you speak with someone and they've got unrealistic expectations. They want a result they're not going to be able to get. Emotionally, people often aren't ready to hear that. So, to be able to help understand the facts and explain to someone why perhaps what they're hoping for isn't something that they're likely to achieve, especially when they're already hurting, they've lost someone, someone's compromised, and they want a result. We can only work within the confines of the law. But oftentimes, people will come to us and we'll go through the background, we'll go through the history, we'll look at the documents, over the facts, and we'll talk to them about what the case really looks like. I like to say we do magic, but we're not magicians. If it's something where we don't think that we're going to be able to leave the client in a better place than we found them, we're not going to waste their time. We're not going to waste their money. We tell people how it is, and sometimes that can be really hard.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
People do, especially when they're emotional, have unrealistic expectations, usually because they don't understand the law.

Scott Rahn:
Correct. And I think we have a better mousetrap. We just have identified this niche, and it's where we live and thrive. There are estate planning lawyers who draft wills and draft trusts, and there are estate administration lawyers who will help an executor or a trustee after someone passes to marshal the assets and inventory them and decide who's supposed to get what and make those distributions. And often, the planners and an administrators are the same people, and then there are some people who do all three things. They do the planning, they do the administration, and they'll do some litigation.
But for us, this area, because it's so specialized and focused, to be good at it, it's something you need to do all day, every day. It's who we are. It's who we are in our souls. But when you combine that with our approach to making sure to do our diligence, understand the cases, be able to advise our clients on what the best course is, continue to understand the facts as they develop, advise on what the strengths and weaknesses are and what a fair result will be, combine that with our bedside manner, what you get is a better mousetrap, because you get a better client experience.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Scott, in every single episode, I emphasize how important it is to plan for your later years, and, of course, a lot of people still don't do it. So, how specifically can having that plan mitigate a possible probate situation?

Scott Rahn:
We see all kinds of plans and we see all kinds of quality, or lack thereof, in those plans. It's like anything else. If you fail to plan, plan to fail. How much time, energy and effort you put into what you want your legacy to be is going to be meaningful, and is going to be more likely to generate that result. And part of that is being honest with yourself about what you have, who your heirs are, what you want them to have, when you want them to have it, and I think that's a really difficult part of the planning process. I'm not a planner, I'm a recovered planner, because it's just not who I am. I'm a trial lawyer.
When you look at how difficult it is just to deal with your own morality, but then perhaps you have a child who has some substance abuse issues, or perhaps some mental health issues, or you have children who don't get along. Being really honest with yourself about what the specific dynamics are of your situation, and being open and honest and vulnerable with your estate planning attorney about those circumstances so that you can build a structure around it that accounts for those kinds of things is the best approach that you can take. Because if you don't confront those issues with your planner, they're going to come up, more likely than not, certainly based on what I do all day, every day. They're going to come up, and in a way that you certainly wouldn't want.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
For me, planning indicates not only that they took the time, but that they cared enough about their family to give them, in a way, a compass, of how to navigate their lives after this person had passed. I know I was so grateful to my dad because he had every I dotted and every T crossed, and it was still so hard. To me, it's like, cough up the courage and make the investment, because your family will be so grateful to you when you're gone.

Scott Rahn:
And they will besmirch your name when you're gone if you didn't. The number of families who I've heard say, "Gosh, I thought mom or dad had their stuff together. I can't believe they left us in this situation." That's not the way you want to leave your family.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
No, you don't. You don't.

Scott Rahn:
I think if you have the opportunity, take the time, spend the resources, do the planning, make it do what you want it to do. If you go through that experience, I think you're more likely than not to be successful in achieving mortem goals.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Also, can I just say, remember to sign your documents. I heard years ago of this horrible situation. It was an 80-year-old cardiologist. He was a cardiologist. And when he passed away, I believe from a heart attack, they found his whole plan all neatly set in a drawer unsigned. He had his first family, the wife had passed. She had a great fortune from her family that of course he got a huge chunk of. Then he had a second family, but he hadn't signed any documents. So, you can imagine where that headed to.

Scott Rahn:
We've seen that before. My guess is the sign here flags were probably still on the pages. We've seen all kinds of things, all kinds of different documents. Estate plans written on napkins, on scratch paper. You name it, we've seen it.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
What's your take on doing a will or a trust on one of the online platforms that usually have legal something in their name, and they have templates?

Scott Rahn:
I think those platforms can be good in a pinch if you need something in a hurry, if you're facing some sort of situation where you don't have time or perhaps don't have the resources. But I'll just share this anecdote from a friend of mine who does professional negligence, malpractice law. He always says, "I love those businesses. They create a lot of work for me."

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Meaning you want to go to a real attorney for that sort of thing.

Scott Rahn:
Yeah, you're going to be better served by going to an estate planner who's going to be able to help you actually understand what those provisions mean, because we've seen all kinds of things with those platforms as well, where there are blanks in the documents. There are no beneficiaries' names. So, you've done a trust, and you pass, and you think, "Great, everything's going to go to the people I wanted it to go to," but it's not complete. There are all kinds of problems. I always like to say, "Look, I could wire my own house, but I shouldn't."

Marty Stevens Heebner:
It could burn down, just like in this case, metaphorically speaking.

Scott Rahn:
Exactly. During the time that I was planning, it always amazed me. We were dealing with some very sophisticated, some very wealthy people, who didn't want to invest what I thought was a very small amount of money and certainly a small amount of time to ensure that their affairs were in order. And I think one of the things that I ended up talking to people about was, if you don't do this, you're going to leave a legacy that leads your children, your spouse, to believe that you didn't have your affairs in order, you didn't have your stuff together, and, "Why did they leave us in such a mess?" And I think that resonated with people, because they might be busy, but when they're successful, they don't want to leave their family with a big mess.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Scott, you launched your own law firm, RMO. Why did you decide to do that?

Scott Rahn:
I spent many years in big law, and I had a great experience, and still have a lot of friends who are at those big law firms. But in this space particularly, the vast majority of clients are individuals, whether it's a family trustee, a family executor, heirs, beneficiaries, et cetera. Most of the big law firms aren't really interested in serving individual clients. They're mostly chasing Fortune 500, Fortune 100 companies that have more consistent work, and they can do the corporate work and the tax work and the employment work and the litigation work, as opposed to just representing families.
And for me, there came a time in my career where I needed to make a decision whether I wanted to continue to work with the families that I worked with or if I wanted to stay in big law. It was a relatively easy decision. I like people, and I like helping families, so while I really appreciated the opportunities that were afforded to me in big law, and making partner, and rising up the partnership ladder and all those things, this is really where I live. This is really a much better fit for me, being able to help people.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
What do you wish people knew about the work that you do that they probably don't know?

Scott Rahn:
In terms of law, I think people look at lawyers as though we're mechanical, that we just go through the Xs and the Os, and this is what the law says, so this is what's got to happen. And that's not really how this works, and certainly not in this space. I'd love for people to understand just how much mental and emotional capital is required to be really good at this specific practice.
Don't get me wrong, the Xs and the Os are important. You need to know the statutes. You need to know the case law. You need to know how the facts as they're developed are going to impact the case. But if you don't take the time, if you don't have the bedside manner to really hear and understand what your client, the family, the dynamics and the full history of what you're looking at, how that all comes together and is intertwined, you're probably going to miss something. All of that takes time, and I wish people appreciated about this, is that probate litigation is a process. If you give that process the time that it needs and the attention that it deserves, the results can be really extraordinary.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
When you're working with older adults and/or their families, you really got to lean in there and listen and imagine who their lives are, step into that. And I imagine, too, that you not only are putting together who your clients are, but also who your opposition is, and try to imagine where they're coming from, because there's a lot of gray in law.

Scott Rahn:
A lot of gray, and a lot of gray in the facts too, right? Because people have their own experience, so you can have two people who sat in the same room, were told the same words, and walked out with two completely different recollections of what transpired. What we always try to compare these cases to is an impressionist painting. An impressionist painting is created through thousands and thousands of teeny, teeny, tiny little brushstrokes to create the picture that you want the viewer to see. And these cases are similar. It's rare that there is one fact in any case that drives the results. It's really a matter of collecting all those teeny, tiny little details, and then putting them together and piecing them together to create that masterpiece that you want the trier of fact, if it's a judge or your own client or their brother, sister, stepparent, to see, so that they understand what the case really looks like.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
That's fascinating that you use that comparison, and it's so important to work with somebody who really understands the details of those brush strokes. I mentioned in the introduction that probate courts are very busy. I think people don't realize what a crisis dealing with older adults and their families and the law is, because those probate courts are jam-packed, and it can take a long time to see the case through.

Scott Rahn:
Correct, and that's to the point that I was making earlier about probate being a process. There is a statistic that I heard from a conference I attended a number of years ago, where they were talking about the number of unrepresented people in court actions, including probate, and the number was quite staggering. It was something like 75% of people involved in a court process, whether it's probate or unlawful detainer, somebody who's staying in their property beyond their lease, don't have a lawyer because they can't afford it. The legal profession isn't going to take their case because it's not big enough. And what we've seen in the probate court is a number of people who don't understand the process. They're doing their best, God bless them, they're just trying to handle their loved one's affairs, but they just don't know what they're doing.
There aren't a ton of resources to be able to help people if they can't get a lawyer, and the court's trying to help them to the extent they can, but that's not why judges are there. Judges are there to process the cases and make sure everything's done right, and they simply don't have the bandwidth to be able to hold everyone's hand to get them across the finish line. Those same people end up coming back again and again, and a case that should take a year, say even 18 months, ends up taking four years, because they're just not doing things the way that they're supposed to be done according to the rules, and that really clogs up the courts. It's certainly something that we deal with in the probate court.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Can legal aid help people like that?

Scott Rahn:
There are all kinds of resources out there, but it's a matter of finding them. We're unable to take every case, obviously, that comes to us, but we always try to refer people if there's a resource for them. In conservatorship cases, for example, Bet Tzedek is a wonderful organization here in Los Angeles, and they have a conservatorship clinic where they will help people with conservatorships. We often refer people to Bet Tzedek if it's not something we can help with.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
We can list that as a resource.

Scott Rahn:
Yeah.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
This is incredible, Scott. Such important information for people to really think about and be aware of. Thank you so much for being here.

Scott Rahn:
Thank you for having me.

Marty Stevens Heebner:
Scott Rahn, founding partner of RMO LLP. You can find out how to contact Scott on our website, howtomoveyourmom.com.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Are you confused by what you've been hearing about cannabis and all its medical uses? Or marijuana, as we called it in my teenage years. There are so many varieties and different uses for the cannabis plant, and it can be very confusing. Fortunately, our guest today is here to demystify things for us, and so if you're curious, keep listening.
Moving your mom or your dad or yourself isn't just about moving things from one place to another. It is much more complicated than that, as are so many things having to do with later life. How to Move Your Mom (and Still be on Speaking Terms Afterward) provides in-depth conversations with professionals, older adults, and their family members who share their stories with warmth, understanding, and humor.
I'm your host, Marty Stevens-Heebner, and here, you'll find answers to many of your questions, as well as different perspectives that I hope will inform and inspire you.
Sue Feldmeth, thank you so much for joining me.

Susan Feldmeth:
Thanks for having me, Marty. I'm happy to join you today.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Here's a bit about Sue Feldmeth, who has 30 years experience as a nurse and is the founder of MC Wellness Consulting, where she's dedicated to safely guiding people through the often confusing world of medical cannabis.
Sue's concerns about her own aging mother's severe arthritis pain and her use of opioids sparked Sue's interest in cannabis. Sue also works as a cannabis consultant at the Kensington Assisted Living and Memory Care Community in Sierra Madre, California, and she is the clinical supervisor for About Senior Solutions, a geriatric care company.
So here's the question I always start out with, Sue. What's your favorite memory of your grandparents?

Susan Feldmeth:
My grandfather lived with my parents from before I was born until he passed away. He lived to be a hundred and was the epitome of health. Looking back, I can see all the things he did well. My sister and I were very picky eaters and did not like to eat our vegetables, so every day, he would walk to the grocery store, buy fresh fruits and vegetables, and juice them. Juicing is so big now, but he was doing it way back in the '70s. So every day, we had a fresh glass of juice that had beets and spinach, but carrots and apples, which would make it good. That way, he was rest assured that we got our vegetables one way or another.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Your grandpa was years ahead of his time then.

Susan Feldmeth:
Yeah, all the things he did, I see, are very trendy right now. We didn't appreciate it at the time. Like with a lot of things when you're young, you don't appreciate the wisdom of our elders.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
So true. Now, let's just get straight to it. What are the different types of cannabis and how can they help us?

Susan Feldmeth:
We'll talk about the two big categories of cannabis. Because we hear marijuana, which is a slang term for the recreational type of cannabis that is usually a short, bushy plant. Lots of flowers. Tends to have high amounts of THC. THC stands for tetrahydrocannabinol. That's the component that makes you high. And then there's hemp, which is a cousin. It's still in the cannabis family, but it has a tall, thick stalk, fewer flowers, and has many thousand industrial uses for hemp. And it primarily has CBD, cannabidiol. It can have, in this country, a third of 1% can be THC, but not more than that. We see a lot of CBD products from hemp because they don't have the same restrictions as a product that's from the marijuana plant.
And I hate saying marijuana because it's a slang term and the plant is called cannabis. Cannabis is a plant, so it has a lot in common with other plants. And if you think about tomatoes, there's beefsteak tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, zebra tomatoes that are green and stripy. There are so many different variations of tomatoes. They're all tomatoes, but they taste a little different, they look a little different, and that's how it is with the cannabis plant as well.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
That's so many different kinds.

Susan Feldmeth:
There's multiple strains. A lot of times in a dispensary, you'll hear the terms indica and sativa. They'll say indica tends to be more sedating, and sativa is more uplifting.
What tells you about the plant is the concentration of cannabinoids. Cannabinoids is a new term probably for a lot of people. CBD and THC are both cannabinoids. That's a family of compounds found in the cannabis plant. These cannabinoids have lots of different benefits and act on different receptors in our body.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
How did you come to start using cannabis to help your mom?

Susan Feldmeth:
The story of my mom is interesting because there's so many parts to it. She was on Norco, which is an opioid, for her pain, taking three or four capsules a day, and she was still in pain and miserable and wanted to die and said it many times a day. She also had the beginnings of dementia at the time.
Her pain management doctor is the one who suggested, "You might want to look into medical marijuana, because I can't go up on her dose anymore. It's not safe." My thought was, "This guy's a quack. How can he recommend medical marijuana for my mom?" All I knew is I'd learned my whole life that it was something bad. And I initially said, "We're not going to do that." And then I thought, "Well, let me learn about it and understand what I'm actually saying no to and why would he recommend it.
That's when I had listened to a podcast about the science of it and was blown away and had to learn more. And I was very skeptical the whole time. Can this be real? It sounds too good to be true. Because the information sometimes you find on the internet are from sources that seem dubious and don't seem to have a medical background, and I just didn't believe it.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
What changed your mind?

Susan Feldmeth:
That's when I found the American Cannabis Nurses Association. So in my mind, it seemed a little bit more legitimate if nurses were looking at it. And the nurses had their educational modules in a way that I understood, kind of boring, scientific approach, which made sense to me, talking about our endocannabinoid system, which all humans have.
It's a system that was discovered in the 1990s by an Israeli scientist, and he discovered a whole new set of receptors that had never been identified before, primarily concentrated in your brain and central nervous system and on the cells of your immune system, and they're found on multiple organs, tissue types, bone. Everywhere that has a cannabinoid receptor is going to interact with the cannabinoids in cannabis.
The next question was why would our body have receptors to a plant? We have receptors because our body makes cannabinoid-like compounds. So our body produces these chemicals only as needed, on demand. And the whole purpose of the endocannabinoid system is to maintain homeostasis, to maintain the body in balance. So when something happens to throw us out of whack, like for my mom, it would be lots of inflammation due to her arthritis, causing a lot of pain.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
What triggers that system into action, and how frequently does it go to work for us?

Susan Feldmeth:
For us, on a daily basis. It could be walking down the street, a car swerves, almost hits you, and you have to jump out of the way. So your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure goes up, you have a surge of adrenaline. But once the danger passes, you have to come back down to baseline. So that's when your endocannabinoid system kicks in. The chemicals are released and it says, "Okay, danger's over, and everything come back to normal." So that's what this system does. It's working in the background.
As we age or have some kind of a disease process, our endocannabinoid system can get out of balance. As we age, we don't make as many of these endocannabinoids, and so supplementing with plant cannabinoids seems to be pretty effective.
As we get older or as we watch our parents get older, they tend to be more anxious about things that they could have handled in the past, and you're like, "What's the big deal? So you have two doctor's appointments on one day." That's too much and they freak out. But I think a natural function of aging, just the way we don't make hormones like we used to when we were younger, we don't synthesize vitamin D as well as we did when we were younger, I think we don't synthesize and make these endocannabinoids that help stabilize our mood and anxiety response as well as we did when we were younger. So I think they're just not as capable to rein those feelings in. We don't make as much melatonin, so we don't sleep as well sometimes as we get older, which is natural.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
When did you first start using cannabis with your mom?

Susan Feldmeth:
Well, my first trip to a dispensary was 2016, and it's not the way it is today. You needed a letter of recommendation from a doctor to go to a medical dispensary. I'd assume it would be like a pharmacy. I foolishly asked if I should bring my mom, if they would want to monitor her after she had her first dose, and the doctor laughed and said, "No, it's not that kind of place." I purchased some CBD gummies, some chocolates, and we gave the first dose to my mom. It was probably five milligrams of CBD.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
I'm just going to interject here that you and I live in California.

Susan Feldmeth:
Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Where now we can go buy it on our own. There are a lot of states that are like that now, but back then, it wasn't legal to go do that. Now it is in many states.

Susan Feldmeth:
I think there are 38 states where cannabis is medically legal. CBD from hemp is legal in all 50 states. Back then, there were a few more hoops to jump through, and in certain states, people might still have to go to a doctor to get a letter of recommendation. Cannabis is not prescribable, so you can't go to a doctor to get a prescription.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Nothing approved by the FDA, in other words, at this point.

Susan Feldmeth:
Nothing approved by the FDA. THC is still a federally illegal substance. That's why it's difficult to research in this country. So each states are coming up with their own laws, and in California, it's a lot easier and we have products readily available.
I would really stress to go to a licensed dispensary. It's more expensive because you are charged lots of taxes, sales tax, the state cannabis tax, and then there's usually a local tax, but you're insured that every product is lab tested, so there are no contaminants. What it says on the label of the product is what's in the product. A lab tested product is crucial.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
You don't want to just go to some dealer who could lace it with who knows what.

Susan Feldmeth:
No.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Go to a licensed dispensary.

Susan Feldmeth:
And especially now in the era of fentanyl and fake pills, that's extremely dangerous to do. So going to a legal dispensary and purchasing a product avoids a lot of that, because if you buy from a reputable CBD company, you Google the US Hemp Authority and see what their recommended companies are, it has to jump through lots of hoops to qualify and get that seal.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
That's very important. That's great to know.

Susan Feldmeth:
So it's good to do a little bit of homework. So little by little, we were able to wean my mom off of her opioids. Actually, quicker than I expected. A few months that she'd been on a regular CBD dosing schedule, she was home from the assisted living facility with me and my family for the weekend, and I heard her laughing. That's when I realized it had been about three years since I heard my mom laugh. She had been very negative for the last few years with her arthritis pain. Very pessimistic, just not herself. So little by little, I felt like her old self was coming back. She didn't have the constipation issues she did while she was on the opioids. So-

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Talk about unpleasant. Yeah.

Susan Feldmeth:
It makes you miserable. The opioids changed her personality. So it was nice to see that coming back. We did have to add some THC to her routine at nighttime, because for some people, CBD can be stimulating and it makes them awake and alert. For other people, it can be really relaxing and almost make them drowsy, and you just have to gauge how it makes you feel. I take CBD, a small dose every day. I don't feel either of those. I just feel regular.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
I'm sure it depends on the plant itself, because you talked about all the varieties, the way the product is manufactured, and then our body chemistries are so different. So our CBD system that's built into us can be very intricate and will respond differently.

Susan Feldmeth:
That's why there's no one dose fits all, even for each condition. So everybody has a personalized CBD or cannabis program, and you just have to see how they respond.
We use some CBD products at the Kensington, which is an assisted living and memory care facility in Sierra Madre, California. Our approach is the same for everybody. We start with a low dose. But it's amazing to me how nine milligrams once or twice a day has transformed a person from being anxious to just going with the flow or participating more, sleeping better. So we start at this low dose and go up as needed, based on the response of the person.
There was one point where my mom needed a hundred milligrams in the morning of CBD, a hundred milligrams in the afternoon of CBD, and 15 milligrams of THC at bedtime. Now, for you and I, 15 milligrams of THC, you'd have to peel us off the ceiling, I think.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Wow.

Susan Feldmeth:
We slowly went up to that. And they do find that for some reason, older women have a higher tolerance for THC. I don't know why.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
We have a higher tolerance for everything.

Susan Feldmeth:
So that's when she was at her height of her arthritis, her anxiety, everything. And then over time, I was able to decrease her down. When she was doing well, I said, "Well, let's see if she can tolerate less." You really have to listen to your body and sometimes go up on the dose, and sometimes you can go down on the dose and just see if you're getting the same effect.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Body chemistries do change over time. You mentioned the tolerance situation. And your mom was very fortunate to have a daughter who's a registered nurse. So it's not only if you're able to express what you're feeling, but also, if somebody has dementia, to be very observant of their movement and how they're reacting.

Susan Feldmeth:
As a nurse, you would think I come with a tool bag of all this knowledge, but it was hard for me to get the information I was seeking, to get the dosage guidance that I needed. I really had to wing it and figure it out on my own, and so that's why I ended up starting my company to share what I've learned, because it was a long journey, and I'm still always learning, and share this in an easy way to help guide people. As a nurse, I can't prescribe or tell people what to do. I give them the education and steer them towards products that I feel are reputable.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
And as you mentioned, it can't be prescribed anyway.

Susan Feldmeth:
A lot of times, doctors, they would just shut a person down who wanted to try it and discourage them. But now, at least with CBD, I think they're confident that it's not harmful if you get a good product. They can't give you much guidance, but they'll say, "Yeah, I think you can try it and have some success with that."

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Here's when I really discovered especially pain relieving benefits. I was on vacation at this place and I got a massage there, and they would use the CBD oils on you. And I've been having the knee, the back, the this, the that, and it was cold. I did that treatment. I got up, put my jacket on. As I'm walking down the stairs outside, I'm not feeling any pain. I turned around, went back in and said, "What products did she use?" They had the products in their store. I bought them, and they're wonderful.

Susan Feldmeth:
Using topical products like that is a real good way for people to start who are nervous about using a cannabis product. A lot of times people will say, "For pain, what's the best way to do it? To ingest it, to use it topically?" And there's not one best way. For my mom, my plan was to attack her inflammation from all sides. CBD is very anti-inflammatory. She was taking something internally, the oil, the capsules, the chocolate, the gummies.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
You told me that you had this ingenious way of creating one dose for your mom so that if someone else was giving it to her, it wouldn't mess things up.

Susan Feldmeth:
When she was at the assisted living facility, I would buy the cannabis oil, and I knew what dose I wanted her to have, so I started making little chocolates. I bought these molds and each chocolate would have her dose or close to it. Another time, I would pre-fill a bunch of syringes, and one syringe was a dose. So she would get a syringe in the morning, a syringe in the evening.
For a long time, I thought, "Let's avoid THC. That's the bad one. CBD is the good one," but that's not the right way to look at it. THC has a lot of beneficial properties, you just have to be more careful because it's intoxicating at a certain level. I didn't want them to accidentally give my mom too much THC and give her a bad experience or lower her blood pressure too much or whatever, so that's why I pre-measured syringes, I prefilled capsules. I went through lots of different iterations. Because not only did I want to help my mom get better, I found this so fascinating. I just wanted to learn more and she trusted me completely.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
You're a registered nurse. Of course.

Susan Feldmeth:
And her daughter and the one who always has taken care of her when she's needed something. But we also used topical products on her knees and her shoulders. You have something.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
I have my little thing. It's calming for a little stress. A friend introduced it to me. It's topical. I just put it on and it smells nice and I don't feel high or anything like that.

Susan Feldmeth:
No, that's a great thing to use. So for pain, when you apply something topically, you're attacking the inflammation and the pain from the outside in. It doesn't work for every kind of pain. Like my mom had hip arthritis, and I think that was too deep in her body for it to penetrate. But knees are bony, right at the surface. Neck, hands, feet. All those little bony joints that are closer to the surface are easier. And I would say to do it twice a day if your pain is every day, and then you can apply more as needed.
We even taught my mom how to use a vaporizer. It looked like a little electric cigarette that was formulated specifically for pain. It had two parts THC, one part CBD. Each dose was measured. When you inhale it, the little plastic cigarette would vibrate and that told you the dose was delivered. We found that where she'd been sitting for a long time and if she had to get up to go to the bathroom, she had to go quickly, but the pain was sometimes too much at that moment. If we gave her one little inhalation, it worked very quickly. It didn't take all her pain away, but it took the edge off enough that now she can get up and go to the restroom. So it's not necessarily which product do I use. I think it was nice to have different types of products on hand.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Think about over-the-counter medications. Each of us knows which one works best for us. I've had people talk about a certain brand, like the T for the flu, and there's the M brand. The M brand actually works for me, but the T brand doesn't.

Susan Feldmeth:
Body chemistry is different. And I find that the people who don't give up right away are the ones who generally find success, because there are so many different products out there. It took us a while to realize we needed to add a little bit of THC to my mom's program to get better results. And just listening to your body. It's fascinating, each person becomes an expert on themselves and what works for themselves.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
You had mentioned earlier that your mom came to rely much less on the opioids. Is cannabis good for helping to ease what could become an addiction to opioids? Because as we know, that is rampant.

Susan Feldmeth:
Yeah, they have shown that CBD is helpful in any kind of addiction. A lot of times it helps to deal with the withdrawal side effects of coming off of either alcohol, drugs, opioids, which is one of the reasons why people don't want to stop using it is because they can't tolerate the effects of not using it. And if it's helping the pain that the opioids were helping, you need less of the opioids because your pain is getting addressed, that's another way it can help. But it also helps with the cravings that were reward-seeking behavior. CBD tends to help regulate that as well. THC, marijuana was always talked about as a gateway drug when I was in school and as a kid.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
I remember.

Susan Feldmeth:
But some addiction specialists are using it as a exit drug. It's easier if you add cannabis to a person who's already addicted to something, and you shift their reliance on whatever hard drug they were on. It's much easier to then get them off of the marijuana than it was to just cold turkey get them off of cocaine or heroin or whatever they're on. So it's been interesting to see that it can be used kind of the opposite of the way we were told.
I really didn't believe when I saw the list of things that people used CBD to treat, because how can it possibly treat alcoholism, Alzheimer's, cancer, arthritis pain, all these different things? Once I understood how our endocannabinoid system works and we have receptors throughout our body, these cannabinoids from the plant interact with the receptors in our body, different organ systems, I do understand how cannabis can have an effect on all those very different conditions.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Sue, what do you wish people knew about what you do, but they generally don't know?

Susan Feldmeth:
I wish they would know not to be fearful of this plant and to ask the right questions. To talk to their doctors about it, to find answers from a health professional. There aren't a lot of cannabis nurses out there, but there are some.
People think I sell products, but I don't. I just share information and give dosing and product guidance. I'm not a doctor, but I do share the information and the education for a person to advocate on their own.
I want people to advocate for their own health, and if they really think CBD or THC is something that can benefit them, keep at it and give it a try and you'll see for yourself. Chances are you're not going to get the results quickly, because it's not that kind of product. It's not like a pharmaceutical that sometimes hits you hard and fast. It's gentle.
There's documentation and evidence of at least 10,000 years of cannabis plants being used medicinally, but the plants back then were not as potent with such high levels of THC as they are now. Nowadays in a dispensary, you can get a product that's maybe 20, 30% THC and naturally occurring in the plant. The way nature intended was maybe 3% to 5% THC or less. So yes, the plants of today are the Frankenstein version of the more naturally occurring.
So it all goes to dose, and a little goes a long way, especially with THC. THC dosing tends to be very low. Maybe one milligram, maybe two milligrams. I wouldn't start at five milligrams. I think that's probably too much to start with. CBD dosing is much more generous, anywhere from 10 milligrams to there's kids with severe epilepsy who are taking 1,500 milligrams.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Wow, and I just want to reiterate, what you're talking about is made from hemp, which is legal in all 50 states.

Susan Feldmeth:
Yes. There's good hemp products and there's good cannabis products. So not to say one is necessarily better than the other, it depends on what each individual person needs. I like to start with hemp products, just because it's less expensive.
And to find a good quality product. Do a little bit of research. A reputable company will send you or let you access the certificate of analysis, the test results that there are no pesticides, heavy metals, contaminants in the product, that the milligrams are what's stated on the label, with a little bit of variation because it is a natural plant.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
That's Mother Nature for you.

Susan Feldmeth:
That's right.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
This is just a wealth of information, very important information, and I'm so grateful to you for being on this episode.

Susan Feldmeth:
Thank you. I was so happy to be here and enjoyed talking with you.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Thank you so much for listening to How to Move Your Mom (and Still be on Speaking Terms Afterward). Please visit howtomoveyourmom.com for more information about this episode and for additional podcast episodes featuring other extraordinary guests and conversations. Until next time, this is your very grateful host, Marty Stevens-Heebner.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
When you think you see the early signs of dementia in a loved one, who do you turn to be sure? A doctor, of course. But what kind of doctor do you want to turn to? If you've never heard of a neuropsychologist before? And even if you have, you definitely want to hear from our expert on this episode.
Moving your mom or your dad or yourself isn't just about moving things from one place to another. It is much more complicated than that. As are so many things having to do with later life. How to Move Your Mom (and still be on speaking terms afterward) provides in-depth conversations with professionals, older adults, and their family members who share their stories with warmth, understanding, and humor.
I'm your host, Marty Stevens-Heebner and here you'll find answers to many of your questions as well as different perspectives that I hope will inform and inspire you.
I am so lucky today to have with me Dr. Dana Chidekel, who's a brilliant neuropsychologist. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here, Dana.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
Oh, Marty, I'm so glad to be here with you. This is a lot of fun me.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
Let me tell you a bit more about Dr. Dana. Dr. Dana Chidekel is a clinical and forensic neuropsychologist double board certified by the American Board of Pediatric Neuropsychology and the American Board of Professional Neuropsychology. Dr. Dana evaluates children and adults aged four to 102 referred for cognitive, developmental, academic and psychiatric problems. She's also retained as an expert witness in many types of cases, including probate and estate planning, which really applies to what we talk about on our podcast. Dr. Dana is the author of Parents in Charge: Setting Healthy Loving Boundaries for You and Your Child. She's also appeared multiple times in the Today show. Very impressive.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
Life is long.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
Life is long. Yes. Yes. So what's your favorite memory of your grandparents?

Dr. Dana Chidekel
My grandparents lived back east. We were in California. And my grandmother would come out, and she would have individual baggies that she'd closed with rubber bands. And she'd have them in a bag. We'd sit in the backseat because we were driving from the airport, and she would, with great ceremony, take each thing out, and we were on tenter hooks, and little things like animal crackers or a little thing she'd cut out from the family circus. But then we also had songs. It's fun that this is video, as well as audio, so I just got to do it for you because my grandmother was a very kind of jazzy, snazzy person in a conservative shell. So if it was time to sing Mr. Moon. So she'd say, "Oh, Mr. Moon, right at silver moon, won't you please shine down on me?"

Marty Stevens-Heebner
Oh, I love that.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
It's a shame we don't get to spend more time with our grandparents as we get older and get to ask them all sorts of questions when you can see them in a wider way.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
That is a shame. I think of even just my parents. Every so often, I think of something, okay, mom would know that. Can't ask her anymore.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
Right.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
So let us talk about the focus of your work. What exactly is neuropsychology?

Dr. Dana Chidekel
So neuropsychology is... You have to be a clinical psychologist, and then do two more years of training to understand the relationship between brain functioning and behavior. My job is to understand what's causing the behavior that I see. So I say it's when people call me, presuming we're not talking about the post-death determination of capacity or influence in somebody I can no longer see, but when somebody comes in, I say, "This is a math problem, and you're coming to me with the answer on the other side of the equal sign. Here's what we see. Here's what we tried. This happened last week." What you don't have is the equation, why is this happening? A neuropsychological evaluation, tests that I give are designed to understand what it is that's driving what you see in order to figure out what to do to make it better. You had mentioned dementia. A lot of times as people get older, certainly as we are all aging and you have these kind of normal lapses, and then the question sometimes becomes, well, it seems to me more than normal, or is it?

And then another question is, a lot of times depression presents like dementia does, and making the differentiation between those is critical in terms of figuring out how to move forward in the ways that are going to be helpful.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
That's a wonderful explanation. Thank you for that. So what's normal forgetting versus more like dementia forgetting.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
Normal forgetting, well, we all do it. It doesn't get in the way of our functioning, and it doesn't put us or anybody else in danger. Early signs of dementia don't necessarily put anybody in danger, but they start to get in the way of functioning and things. I think you have to also understand that for each person, they have a baseline of who they were. I knew someone who was the head of cardiology for a major teaching hospital, and he began to become demented, and his long-term care insurance company denied him. They sent him for an evaluation, and he scored in the average range in a variety of areas. Even before I did my evaluation, I said, "This is the head of the cardiology department. You think he's average? You think this represents okay functioning?" So it was clearly a sign that he was losing his capacities. So it's all relative to the person. And then the way that we think about intervening is when we start seeing it getting in the way of taking care of yourself, or on the other side, also maybe harming others.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
You'd mentioned that depression can sometimes look like dementia. Can you talk about that a little more?

Dr. Dana Chidekel
People who are depressed, they're forgetful, they may not take care of their hygiene. They're withdrawn socially. They can look like people who are becoming demented. One of the critical differences, and one of the things you look for when you're testing is really how good is memory? When we talk about memory, it's not just one thing. What can this person remember? How much can you initially take in? How much of what you took in can you what we call retrieve spontaneously? Like if I say, "What were those words I just read to you?" But then if I said, "Was this a word that I said to you? Was this a word?" sometimes people go, "Oh yeah." So it's in there, and it was a matter of how it got filed that's an issue. You can see problems with the organization of things, but when you start actually losing information or it never gets encoded to begin with, that's more a sign of dementia.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
That's the neuro part of neuropsychology.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
It is, and to understand the brain systems that are involved in different kinds of dementing illnesses. I'm a little bit of a concrete thinker. Things have to make sense to me. If something doesn't make sense, it makes me worry. My first specialization is in pediatric neuropsychology because you have to understand what is it that develops, that lets us go from being utterly dependent to then being able to take things over on our own. So when you look at neurodevelopment, and then on the other side of life, sometimes neurodegeneration, there are certain capacities that we lose. So understanding what it was to begin with is so important.

For example, here are four things that are developing very dynamically through childhood, and they are the ability to initiate action to purposefully set yourself in motion to something you need to do, the ability to not act, which is inhibition, the breaking system, the ability to keep something going once you've started it, so you get to your goals, and the ability not to keep something going once you've started it so you don't get rigidly fixated on something that no longer is what you really need to do. When you think of little itty bitty kids, they aren't developed in this. We don't say, "Okay, when you get to the street, stop.' We hold their hands. We are the breaking system. We say, "Now it's time to brush your teeth. Now it's time to put on your socks."

We are supporting all of those capacities as they're developing. "Oh, look at this. We were going to go on a picnic, but it's raining. We're going to make a different plan." That kind of shifting. As those things develop, they allow us to then take over responsibility for life on our own. If you look at components of what we lose, the ability to know, oh, I've got to call the doctor, or go to the appointment, or take my medicine, it's a more childlike way of being. Impulse control can go. That can make people who need a lot of help very difficult to help because they can get very cantankerous. And they can get paranoid because they know something's wrong and they don't have the insight to say, "Wait, this is me," because that's part of what goes. You can see that there's no breaking system, that people get rigid. They can't understand bigger ideas, so you look and see what is it that people are losing that makes them more dependent on others.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
Years ago, we were working in a home. We were helping the son, who was the executor, clear out the home. I was working on the desk. And I opened the desk drawer, and it was filled with the check boxes that checks come in. And remember, they used to send all the checks back? I opened one of the boxes, and there was this pristine wallet. It was a men's wallet, [inaudible 00:08:55] bills in it, new credit cards, except they had expired years ago. I took it to Tom, and I said, "I found this." And he goes, "Oh, the wallet." It was a family story. His mother had started to exhibit signs of dementia. And his father had come home, really tired from work, and sat down. And they had a little bar there, so he'd left his wallet and probably his car keys on top of the bar. He had his eyes closed. He heard his wife come in and go. When he stood up just seconds later, the wallet was gone. So he went to find his wife and he asked her where it was, and she could not remember.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
Oh wow.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
I think part of the story is that was a huge indication that her dementia was worsening substantially. She just couldn't remember within the space of about 30 seconds. But here's the thing that I said to Tom. I said, what's fascinating is that she had tucked it away in the drawer with all the canceled checks. So she thought it was unsafe, the wallet.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
Right. Right.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
And took it and put it in with the other stored items that had to do with money.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
There's a relationship there. It makes a certain kind of sense.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
That was so interesting. And that was a tough story for them to live through, very tough story.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
I'm also thinking with my forensic hat. What were the dates on the credit cards? You can really start to look at how somebody's functioning when you look for clues like that.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
What are the benefits of a neuropsychological exam for older adults?

Dr. Dana Chidekel
The reasons people do it is when they have questions. You've been noticing your parent is more forgetful or something. You've already found something, which is why you're calling me. And the question is, what's the source of it? An evaluation is, first and foremost, a kind of therapeutic tool to give people a way of thinking about the things that they're seeing in themselves or others. When there's a problem, our brains like to make sense of things. Let's think about this ability to inhibit behavior, put on the brakes. That is a critical thing in terms of... Little kids can't use thinking to guide their behavior before this develops. They just act, right? Squirrel. So as we can stop ourselves, we can think about what we're doing. Well, as that diminishes, we can't think. We just act in response to what's in front of us. The wallet's missing. You're here, you did it, and your brain wants to make sense of it.

Helping people to understand this isn't your mother trying to make you crazy. This is really something you can have empathy for because she is struggling in a world that doesn't make sense, and she is doing what everyone's brain does, which is trying to make sense of a situation so it's resolved, because otherwise your brain kind of keeps chewing on it. And brains don't like to do that. Brains are like, I've got a lot to do. Put this away so I can keep doing the things that I need to do.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
Like keeping you breathing and keeping your heart beating.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
Keeping you breathing, keeping your heart beating, keeping you alert for dangers in your environment? On the Savanna, where did I put the club? Wait a second, I had a torch that I was going to use fire, and I think I put it here. And then the saber-toothed titer comes and takes you out because your brain was occupied with some kind of repetitive thought or distraction, as neuropsychologists... If fundamentally your brain is about survival, how do we make sense of all these fancy terms and ideas in terms of what those would've looked like in more primitive times?

Marty Stevens-Heebner
Yes, and they didn't have a phone screen that they were staring at or going through photos on it Yes.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
Who was happier before we had answering machines? It's seductive. There's that feeling of there's just more and more and more and more, but it doesn't feel good. There's a wonderful author, Peter Whybrow. I think he was the head of the Semel Institute at UCLA. He's a psychiatrist. And he wrote a book called American Mania: When More is Not Enough. And it is incredibly readable and it talks about the way we live in our society, goes into the genetics of it, and it's like a manic episode. If you've ever seen a patient who has a bipolar disorder or is it a manic state, it's this inquisitive thing that feels great. But then it doesn't feel great, and they can't stop. And they get irritated and agitated, but you keep going and keep going. So he talks about this state of being like a manic state that we're in. It doesn't feel good, but it doesn't let go.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
It does feel like that. And COVID didn't help matters.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
Oh God.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
That's a whole other episode.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
One of my mentors said, if you are a competent neuropsychologist, you should be able to conduct the entire evaluation with a ball and a stick. And I had the extension to do something like that. It was not a ball and a stick. It was a plate of cookies in advance of a social event that I was arranging with an elderly person. And I'd say, "Joan, make yours look like mine." And we did this whole evaluation. I was able to definitely assess that she was having a lot of cognitive problems based upon watching how she was doing things. She would get the brownies and she pinched them, and she couldn't stop. And that's a symptom of your breaking system that doesn't work. It's called stimulus boundedness. There's a stimulus and you're bound to it. You can't stop yourself from responding. So every time she'd pick up a brownie, she'd pinch it. And I'd say, "Joan, okay, don't pinch them," and she couldn't help herself. It was amazing.

So the authority behind a neuropsychological test isn't in the test itself. It's an understanding what the findings mean. You have to think about what it is that they're measuring and how to watch how someone gets to the scores that they do. But I think it's important for my field, that we practice at a certain level, and that we represent the field in a way that has a certain kind of standard.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
Dr. Dana, what distinguishes your practice from others?

Dr. Dana Chidekel
I am board certified. And if you're working with somebody, you should make sure that they're board certified. It does mean that you met a certain standard of education and that you passed a certain standard of knowledge with respect to the material of your field.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
I have to mention you're double board certified.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
Very impressive.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
Thank you. Part of that is wanting to test myself and say, have I mastered this? It is based on my need to have things make sense, to understand neurodevelopment and neurodegeneration. I can be a kind of concrete thinker and certain things are very hard for me to understand, and I've never been able to kid myself if I don't understand something. I need to understand things in a way that I can explain them in common sense terms. I take complicated ideas and explain them in simple ways, and I do that whether I've done a clinical evaluation and I'm now meeting with the people to talk about the findings of that. It turns out to be a wonderful skill to have as a expert witness because your whole job is to teach people, to say, "Oh, okay, I took all this information and I looked at it, and here's what it is," and to be able to tell the story in simple, credible ways that people can follow.

So I think one of the things that distinguishes me is kind of a mission statement that my job is to explain these things in ways that are accessible to everyone. By definition, people who come for evaluations are anxious about something. Something is wrong. And for me to be able to deliver something that's tangible that people can understand and feel better, that doesn't increase their anxiety, but to make it something that's tangible that people can understand.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
It's so important because we've all been to doctors who talk in medical jargon, and you have to ask them to interpret it, and they can't necessarily do that. But I know, you've told me this, that you really love being a teacher.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
I love teaching. I think about my grandmother going back to that story, and what pleasure we got out of those little things. But now I know, and I'm getting chills as I say this, what pleasure she had in giving them to us, how special it was for her, right? Because it feels wonderful to give something and to have it received. Teaching is, okay, I'm going to understand this, and then I'm going to give it to you. So this is my job. This is why we're together, is you needed me to understand something. And now I've understood it, and I'm going to give it to you so you can have it. And then it makes the person feel better, hopefully. Sometimes in the short term, not so much, but it's such an amazing feeling for me. And I love that, whether it's in my professional practice or in something else that I do and understand and somebody else is interested in. I love sharing it and seeing that they have received it.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
It's almost even better for the giftor door than the giftee.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
If we all did one kind thing for each other during the day, simple thing, let someone in front of you when they're merging on the freeway, let them in front of you in the grocery line, that would shift so much, because it seems that things have gotten so primitive and everybody is looking out for what's going to happen like it's a dog eat dog thing. But if we then had in mind that we would be doing these things and we would notice when other people were doing them, the other part of this, for those who, okay, forget all that, you want to take control of a situation, do that. It's like-

Marty Stevens-Heebner
So true. Give somebody something.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
Give somebody something. Right. Let them in on the freeway. You have controlled that circumstance. But I think it would be such a wonderful shift in our world.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
I think it's important. I think I've told you this, that chronic depression runs in my family and I have it.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
And one of the things I'm proudest of is that I really dug in and learned how to manage it, how to deal with it. That took a lot of work. It was really hard, and it took years, but my life is really great now, and I'm so glad I did that work. You have to do the work.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
And it's interesting when you talked about depression and dementia, because I remember I was so caught up in my own depression when I was younger that I couldn't remember things. I couldn't think through things or comprehend them necessarily.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
Well, it's actually part of the diagnostic criteria for depression, kind of confused, difficulty making decisions. A lot of times, it goes along with sleeping problems that make everything worse. So if you just look at which check mark you have to check, there's a definite kind of Venn Diagram overlap, because essentially dementia is, you can't pay attention to the things you need to pay attention to and store them effectively.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
It's an interesting comparison, and an important one too, because they're very different diseases.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
And they need different treatments. There are conditions that are progressive that deteriorate, but depression is not one of those. Depression is transient. It's treatable. So that's a critical thing to understand in terms of not only what are we going to do for this person now, but also what are we thinking for this person in a year, in two years, in three years in the future? It is a progressive disease, unfortunately not curable.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
When I'm training staff, sometimes we have to talk to the relatives of someone who has dementia and just remind them it's the disease.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
They're not trying to drive you crazy.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
Right.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
It's the disease. They really don't remember that they've asked you the same question five times in the last 10 minutes.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
Right.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
They can't remember. Are there any risks associated with neuropsychological testing on people?

Dr. Dana Chidekel
It's not an invasive process. There is interviews, and then there's sitting at the table and having people put blocks together and trace paths on mazes. Sometimes there's computerized reaction time tests, but none of them are injecting anything into anybody's anywhere, in their veins or anywhere. You're not putting leads on their head. There's nothing that should be traumatizing. People say most of that was pretty interesting, and some of it was boring, but it's all interactional. Because as I said, I'm as interested in how people get to the scores they get as I am in the scores they get. For example, look at this picture of these red and white blocks. And now, here these blocks. I want you to make that. So let's say it's a two by two design, and you're allowed 75 seconds to do it.

Let's say the person does it accurately, but they took 90 seconds. Well, they would fail it. And let's say a person just stacks the blocks one on top of the other, doesn't even understand the thing, they also fail it. Or let's say somebody does it, but they make a mistake in the upper right hand corner, and that's an area they consistently make mistakes on in other ones, they'll fail it. All those people are getting scores of zero. But that's why I'm saying you can give these tests. You just have to understand all the information they give you in all of these kind of observations.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
It's not cookie cutter.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
Please let it not be cookie cutter any more than any of us are. These things, you can't give them by drive-through. It's an interactional experience, and you're looking at nuances. You're watching different qualities of behavior, qualities of movement. Is there a tremor? You're also understanding something about credibility. And it's most relevant in the forensic work that I do, people who have a vested interest in appearing more impaired or may have a vested interest in that. You have to understand what your case is and who your person is, and whether you can trust the numbers that you got. Because you can give a whole bunch of tests and you could score them, but if you also have evidence that doesn't really represent what they can do, then you just have a bunch of meaningless numbers. No one can fake good on a cognitive test. You can't do better than you can do, but you can definitely do worse than you can do. So if they're doing well in certain areas, they didn't fake that, it's the other ones that you don't know about.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
What questions should somebody ask when they're considering which neuropsychologists to work with?

Dr. Dana Chidekel
You can ask, what are they going to cover? And do they include psychological testing? And how important do they think that is? One of the things you want to understand is what somebody's philosophy is. And I think that there are questions to ask, but then there is your own subjective experience while you're talking to the person. Mine is a very kind of hands-on process. I feel like part of deciding to work with me and part of my decision about whether I want to work with somebody is needing to talk with them and explain to them what things are, and then get a sense of who they are and whether this is going to be a good match for my point of view as well. So you can ask about board certification, you can ask about philosophy. There are some neuropsychologists who think of themselves as very specialized in understanding cognitive functioning, and psychological part of it is not part of it.

That's not my practice. I'm very interested in understanding the interplay between how we think and how we feel, how things that we struggle with affect our emotional lives, and how our emotional lives affect what we can do. So it's a big picture.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
You were talking about all the observations that a good neuropsychologist needs to be able to make. You want somebody, I imagine, with a lot of empathy and who is just a great listener.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
You need somebody who's a great listener and a great observer, but you have to know what you're looking for. You have to know what's relevant, what's significant. Well, if somebody's limping, for example. You have to ask about it. Are you in any pain? How did you sleep last night? Does someone seem tired? Does it seem like after lunch, they're falling asleep? All of those things are important. There's an old urban legend about somebody who was being evaluated by a large research organization. To understand this story, you have to understand that your right hand is controlled by the left side of your brain and your left hand is controlled by the right side of your brain. So the person did just terribly on everything that was presented to her left hand, like pegs in a peg board, group strength. It was an unbelievable difference. And so the person concluded that this person must have a massive right hemisphere injury. The thing was the person's left hand was in a cast.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
Oh, come on.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
So you can't just say, "I'm a hammer. Everything looks like a nail." First, you got to rule out other stuff. If someone's limping, you're thinking, is that because of a brain problem, or is that gait because of something, oh, I recently had surgery, as opposed to it being an underlying kind of neurodegenerative problem? So you have to look at things, and then you have to know what to ask about and what's relevant. So it's a trained eye.

And the empathy part, I think you have to be interested in people and love your work. Be very open, and then also understand how to give bad news, because sometimes you have to give bad news. I think it frightens people to come for the assessment. I do evaluations if somebody is an older person who's making changes in an estate plan, and it is anticipated that someone who might be disadvantaged in the new plan is going to come later and say, "Oh, my dad didn't have capacity when he signed that and he was unduly influenced by my sister and everything." So I will sometimes get called in to do an evaluation, and this is usually for larger estates, that is at the same time that they're doing that signing to determine do they have the capacity, based on the legal standards, and are they being influenced?

But nobody who's referred for these kind of evaluations wants to come. Here you are, this person, you're aging, you're having this because you're at an age where this might be questioned. There's nothing for you to gain from this. The only thing is you might find out, yikes, aren't we all hoping we don't pull that card from the deck?

Marty Stevens-Heebner
Oh my goodness, yes. And the thing is though, what they do walk away with is a diagnosis.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
It's a diagnosis, and now that we know this, it also lets us say, here's what you can do now. Here's the ways you can prevent things from getting worse. Here's the measures you can take to protect yourself or your loved one. But even to come, I think it's so hard for people. Even when I'm evaluating kids for parents to pick up the phone, it's a decision to say, "Okay, I'll take the next step, and I'm afraid that there may be something to see." And sometimes it's exactly what you were afraid of, but then you can say, "Okay, we've opened it. Here's the monster in the closet." It's not whatever you thought it was as long as it's hidden, right? We can expose it and say, that's what the monster looks like. Let's make friends with the monster. This is how it behaves, and let's make some plans around that so you don't have to feel so helpless.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
If you got a big lump somewhere, that monster's not going to go away.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
It's like an uninvited guest everywhere. It frightens you all the time. It's always with you until you actually look and see what it is, but it's a very strong desire to keep things the same. This is my fear, this is how I live, but it's going to change things when you take a look at it. And brains don't like to change either because they know how to run the programs they're familiar with, and it lets them keep their brain eyes open for the saber-toothed tigers on the Savanna.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
And that's why the work you do is so important. Thank you so much, Dr. Dana, for being with me today. Such important information, and you talk about it so beautifully.

Dr. Dana Chidekel
Marty, I'm so appreciative of the opportunity to be here and talk to you, and honored that you would ask me. And I'm happy that we had a chance to do it.

Marty Stevens-Heebner
Me too. Thank you.
Marty Stevens-Heebner: Thank you so much for listening to How to Move Your Mom (and still be on speaking terms afterward). Please visit www.howtomoveyourmom.com for more information about this episode and for additional podcast episodes, featuring more extraordinary guests and conversations. Until next time, this is your very grateful host Marty Stevens-Heebner.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (00:00):
The word minimalism probably conjures up images of a monochromatic living room with one sofa, one table, and a single flower in a ceramic vase. Our next guest has a down to earth approach to simplifying your home, focusing on your own perspective and what matters to you, or maybe a parent who's moving. Her thousands of Facebook fans attest to just how embraceable her approach is, and I bet you'll become a fan too after this episode.

(00:31):
Moving your mom or your dad or yourself isn't just about moving things from one place to another. It is much more complicated than that, as are so many things having to do with later life. How to Move Your Mom and Still Be On Speaking Terms Afterward provides in-depth conversations with professionals, older adults, and their family members who share their stories with warmth, understanding, and humor. I'm your host, Marty Stevens-Heebner, and here you'll find answers to many of your questions as well as different perspectives that I hope will inform and inspire you.

(01:09):
I'm so excited to have Zoe Kim here. She's a renowned author, and she has an extraordinary approach to minimalism and truly is an expert. Thank you so much for being with me today, Zoe. I really appreciate it.

Zoe Kim (01:20):
Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (01:23):
Let me tell you a little bit more about Zoe. With 180,000 plus followers on Facebook, Zoe Kim and her company, Raising Simple, extols the benefits of minimalism for families, and that's also the name of her bestselling book, Minimalism for Families. And it's terrific.

(01:40):
Simplicity is good for us all, but for Zoe and her blended household of four kids and three step-kids, it's especially vital. Zoe doesn't just focus on the logistics of downsizing your space, she believes in developing a minimalist lifestyle through positive perspective changes as well as all those practical solutions she discusses in her book. In addition to all those wonderful kids, Zoe's married to Matt Paxton of PBS's Legacy List with Matt Paxton, a previous guest on How to Move Your Mom. And together, they make quite the insightful and hilarious pair. I'm not going to attest to this, they're very fun to be around. I always start out by asking what's your favorite memory of your grandparents?

Zoe Kim (02:23):
Oh, I love this. I actually lived with my grandparents during my high school years, and so I had quite a bit of time with them. And I really enjoyed cooking with them. My grandfather was first generation born Italian, and he would make homemade pasta and pies and the specialty Easter pie. And it's a Italian ricotta pie. I now make that with my children and reminisce and think back to those memories with them.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (02:49):
You're making me hungry. I may have to come over to your house on Easter. I'll fly in. How were you drawn to this work that you do?

Zoe Kim (02:56):
11 years ago, I only had two children. And my now ex-husband was in the military, and he was deploying all the time, and we had to make a move not far, actually, that was not covered by the military because we decided to move to a different house. And I had to move without him, so it was just me and my two kids moving.

(03:16):
And I was packing up this stuff, boxes of things, and I'm like, "What is all of this? And why do I have this many clothes? I don't even like clothes shopping. How did all of this get here?" And in the same time span, I also wanted to begin wasting less in the kitchen so I got on Google and I found Bea Johnson, who is basically the zero waste guru. She has two kids and a husband. And I saw photos of her home and how simplified it was. And although my home is not as simple as hers, I just saw her house, and she has this amazing life, and I thought that's freedom right there, and I want that freedom.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (03:55):
Brilliant. I hate to think of you having to move with two little kids.

Zoe Kim (04:00):
That's how it all began. I just began peeling away layer after layer, which I like to call maybe an onion. Sometimes as you get down to the more sentimental things, you might end up crying like you do when you cut the onion.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (04:12):
That's a great comparison. It's true. Yes. That's wonderful. What inspired your unique approach to minimalism?

Zoe Kim (04:21):
Have you ever done the Enneagram, the Myers-Briggs personality test where-

Marty Stevens-Heebner (04:26):
Oh, ages ago.

Zoe Kim (04:27):
Okay. For all your listeners that might be into this, I am an ENFP, extroverted intuitive feeler. And I'm a P, which means I can't believe I was on time to your podcast because I'm usually late.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (04:41):
I'm probably a P too.

Zoe Kim (04:45):
But I feel like with that, some of my talents are being compassionate and one of the more open-minded personality types. I'm very non-judgmental and I want to meet you wherever you're at and help you get to the next step. Everybody is in a different place, everybody has different struggles. That's why when they say, "Oh, where should I start?" I feel like I want to ask questions because there's no one magic answer on where to start. Are there some guidelines and some helpful tips? Absolutely. But there's not one spot that's going to work for everybody. I feel like that is my gift; this compassionate, non-judgmental approach to help people simplify their life and make it better.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (05:23):
It's interesting because sometimes with my company, with Clear Home Solutions, we have an organizing job. And they've worked with a professional organizer before and stopped working with them because they were saying very alienating things like, "Why do you have all these? You've got to get rid of that. This is ugly. Let it go." And that's just not the way to approach it.

Zoe Kim (05:40):
That's very off-putting. And as soon as you start speaking like that, and I know this because I have seven kids, the wall goes up and not listening to you.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (05:48):
That's a really good point. Yep.

Zoe Kim (05:49):
You're not on my side. I need to protect myself from this situation, so my guard's up. And then they're going to be less open to the suggestions that you have to make.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (05:57):
This is a note to adult children who might be working with their parents. I know it's hard, having been there, but really be patient, find out what matters to them, and make it a positive experience. Don't start bossing your parents around, because all you'll end up hearing is, "Hey, I'm the parent here," because that's what they're used to, so be respectful.

Zoe Kim (06:17):
Yeah. Yeah. You've got me thinking. Another thing to do, for those that are simplifying with their parents, is, if it's possible, have them come over to your place first and tell them you need their help in simplifying because you want to make your space and your life better and you would just love it if they would come along and just help you say yay and nay and make those decisions. And then they're going to be open to you helping them.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (06:43):
That's amazing. What a great idea. Did you really just think of that?

Zoe Kim (06:47):
I do that with my kids. And with all respect and love, because I love elderly people, I had an amazing relationship with my grandparents, sometimes they're like kids.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (06:57):
Sometimes we're all like kids; let's face it.

Zoe Kim (06:59):
But as those situations turn and life goes on, sometimes we're stepping into our parents' life. And we have to remember it's more like guiding them, not dictating, "You can't keep this," because that's not going to work.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (07:11):
Got to be respectful. They've lived through so much, when you think about it. Becoming simplified definitely makes keeping yourself organized a lot easier because there's just not so much stuff to juggle.

Zoe Kim (07:23):
Absolutely. There is a quote on that, not my quote, think it's The Minimalist, "The easiest way to organize is to get rid of most of it." On that note, I am not innately an organized person at all. And that's something that comes as a big surprise to a lot of people. I took a poll on my Instagram one time. Most of the people who follow me are organized; they love to organize. To me, it's torture. I'm probably an organizer's dream, I would be their dream client where I don't have too much stuff. I am not organized by nature; that's exactly why I need less.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (07:56):
I wouldn't have thought that either. Actually, I was not innately organized. I had to learn how to be organized.

Zoe Kim (08:02):
And then how much time do you want to spend being organized and taking care of your stuff? And that was what was draining me. That's where the overwhelm came from. We're not made to care for so many things.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (08:14):
Since we're talking about just the volume of things that can be in a person's home, I found it really interesting in your book... I love this. As you see, I bookmarked, I highlighted. I loved it. Minimalism for Families. I highly recommend it. It's beautifully written. In it, you quote, a professional organizer named MJ Rosenthal who said that the average American home contains 300,000 items. That's mind boggling.

Zoe Kim (08:37):
Astonishing.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (08:38):
I'm sure my staff would probably agree with that. Every single fork, every single little piece of jewelry, each lipstick, that's a-

Zoe Kim (08:50):
And to add on to that, those families, and I've been there, maybe I still have 300,000 because I have seven kids, we're still in the mindset that we need more. And that's the crazy part. We have so many things. We can't find things, we lose things, we get decision fatigue. We're overwhelmed.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (09:07):
One of the things that you espouse on your book that I also encourage with people who are going to do it on their own as opposed to working with a professional is create a time block. Do it for an hour. Especially if you're just starting out, don't say, "I'm going to do it all Saturday afternoon." You will never want to do it again if you do that. You mention some different kinds of ways of going about it, and you say the LUK method, which is-

Zoe Kim (09:31):
Love it, use it, know it.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (09:32):
The LUK method, love it, use it, know it. And I frequently do friends, acquaintances and strangers. Different methods work with different people. And I can remember specifically one client who was... She thought she was a hoarder. She really wasn't. There was one room that had a lot of stuff. But that really worked with her because her emotional ties to people. And then sometimes we also just do keep, donate, trash. Whatever works for you in terms of your mindset, that's how you want to categorize things. And also, you talk about making it fun, like playing music.

Zoe Kim (10:02):
Yes, that can be a game changer for real. Get some ice tea, your favorite drink, put some music on. Give yourself 20 minutes, clean out a drawer. But my blanket advice to everybody on where to start is somewhere where they can start and complete the task in that one period of time. That feels motivating and not emotionally heavy. If you're motivated to do it and you can complete it in the amount of time you have, if you have 30 minutes, then do that because I want you to have the win. I don't want you to start doing something and feel overwhelmed and not complete it, because then it's not finished. And that's not a win, that's just another thing that you didn't get to. I'm speaking from experience here.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (10:44):
And I totally agree with you. I've been there too. Yes.

Zoe Kim (10:46):
I am a royal procrastinator. I'll put it off. And that's why I cannot have too much stuff. I cannot do it.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (10:55):
I totally agree with you because I, at a point last year, had three conferences in three and a half weeks. I was essentially gone for a month. And I came home and I said, "I have too much stuff." I decided then and there that each day, I would find at least one thing to let go of. And that's been great. It's really made me feel good every single day. That's my goal, to get rid of one of my 300,000 items, or whatever I've got.

Zoe Kim (11:17):
There you go. And not bring anymore in, because then it doesn't count, Marty.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (11:23):
That's so true. Yeah. And then one of the things you talked about in the book is once you've simplified your life to the point where it's simplified for you, you can, especially with your kids, teach them if you're bringing something new in, you've got to let something go. I think you've done that with your children, right?

Zoe Kim (11:37):
I have. Otherwise, we would be drowning and all kinds of stuff. And I have a couple natural pack rats.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (11:44):
They're rebelling.

Zoe Kim (11:45):
Each one of our seven kids has their own cubby. And it's very interesting to open up each cubby and see what it looks like. It's almost like, okay, this is what your house might look like. We better get this under control. We better implement these guidelines a little more often.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (12:01):
It's good to have company too. And actually, one of the things that you inspired me to think of was that, especially with our older clients that we work with, I'm going to talk to my staff about when they're working with them, see if they want to listen to some music, play something that really gets them moving. Could be swing music. Discover swing music. It's great music. Or something from the '50s or what have you. But something that they really like that puts a smile on their face and makes them want to move and do things.

Zoe Kim (12:28):
Yes. I recommended that in my book because I had a photographer come out to my house to do family photos, and she played music while she was photographing, and I thought, this is brilliant.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (12:37):
It puts you at ease, it changes your energy level, all that great stuff. Talking about your kids, one of the things that I think is so helpful is the concept that you have of the capsule wardrobe.

Zoe Kim (12:48):
A capsule wardrobe is the collection of clothing narrowing your wardrobe down to your 30 best items. I created a capsule wardrobe for my children. And they have about 10 outfits all interchangeable; the shirt can go with any of the pants and vice versa. And if that's what they have in their closet, that's what they put on. And there's not all this other stuff to sort through. Out of season clothing is packed away, so it's just your capsule wardrobe for that season.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (13:14):
I also understand is how you and Matt got together. And the story with Matt was that his son was having such a hard time trying to pick out what to wear.

Zoe Kim (13:22):
His son was having a hard time with the overwhelm of everything in his closet, because not only did he have the clothes he wore, he had the clothes he didn't wear at all, then he had at a season clothing. And also, Matt was storing other stuff in his closet that wasn't his, so he was completely overwhelmed. And Matt read my book, and he tried it. He took everything out of the closet, only put back in the clothing that he wanted to wear, and he woke up the next day, and he came down, and he was so excited to show his dad. He was like, "Look, I'm all ready." No fighting, no battles. It's so much simpler.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (13:58):
It's so much simpler, especially for older adults when they're downsizing and maybe moving into assisted living or something like that. There are so many memories attached to clothing, but if it doesn't fit, you don't need it. And why not just drill down where you can make an easy decision and just get down to breakfast, meet up with your friends and all that?

Zoe Kim (14:16):
And so to follow up on that, tail end of that story, after he helped his son, he reached out to thank me on Instagram. And then we had a working relationship for a while, and then he moved in.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (14:27):
Things evolved, things evolved in a beautiful way. You mentioned how good Matt's son felt when he dressed himself in no time and it was really easy. The benefits of minimalism aren't just anecdotal, there's a real science behind it. And you mentioned that in your, again, wonderful book, Minimalism for Families. You mentioned a study that was done at the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives and Families. I got my master's at UCLA, and I didn't know that existed.

(14:56):
Forgive me, I'm just going to read back to you your own book. When we keep our environment cluttered, we are visually and emotionally distracted, and this creates stress and anxiety. In a study done by UCLA's Center on Everyday Lives and Families, a team of professional archeologists and anthropologists, which I find fascinating, and other social scientists systematically observed in recorded details of life at home for 32 dual-worker, middle class LA families between 2001 and 2004. The team discovered that managing a large volume of possessions was linked to elevated levels of stress hormones for mothers. In other words, the more clutter the piles up, the more anxious women feel. And apparently too, excess stuff can really affect the kids that way too. That's fascinating to me.

Zoe Kim (15:42):
I think that just highlights something that I see in my online community. The overwhelm that women and mothers feel from their homes is just debilitating.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (15:54):
It is frustrating for women because women, especially when they're kids, even when you're working professionally full-time, all the housework still mostly falls to you.

Zoe Kim (16:05):
Yep. Unless you marry the cleaning expert of the country named Matt Paxton, then I 100% agree with you. I feel for all those other women. I wish I could clone Matt.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (16:17):
And what's great is that I think Matt... And there are wonderful husbands like him, and fathers who really see that they're doing their part. They're not doing you a favor. It's just doing your part at home, guys. It's a good thing.

Zoe Kim (16:29):
We're not saying that every man is like that, but we are saying that we've had some experience with this. Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (16:36):
And you're younger than I am. My generation is still like that. Anyway, I love your idea of inviting them over to your home and doing the same thing; playing some music, showing them that you're having a good time. And I think it's a great idea to get stuff done. And it helps to have company.

Zoe Kim (16:53):
And they're going to know and feel that you're not just telling them what to do too. There are a lot of older people who don't like to feel like they're the only ones needing help.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (17:01):
True. You start to feel all the aches and pains. And maybe you get a chronic illness, maybe it can be managed, maybe it's a bit more serious. But there's that sense of control being taken away by your body and then by the culture at large. It's so hard. I think people feel, men and women who are older, is that their home should be something they can control. And when you do simplify, you actually are taking charge and control of your home.

Zoe Kim (17:28):
Exactly. And your time too. Not just physically what's in your home and the actual act of deciding, "Okay, this is my house, this is my stuff, I get to keep what stays and what goes." But you're also dictating what you're going to be doing with your time, which is not taking care of too much stuff. Did you know that I have a tiny house in my backyard and that my mom lives there? Yes.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (17:49):
Oh, tell me about that.

Zoe Kim (17:51):
When I built the house that we currently live in, I designed it and built it with an architect and a builder. I'm not a builder. But they were like, "You need a walk-in closet." And I was like, "Oh hell no, I don't."

Marty Stevens-Heebner (18:02):
Don't tempt me.

Zoe Kim (18:03):
Anyway, I built, I call it the tiny house, but it could be a guest house, cottage house. It's 498 square feet on foundation in my backyard for my mom; and that's where she lives. She has her own space. It has a bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and a small living area.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (18:19):
That's great because she can live more simply in there. One of the things that I always tell clients is that you want to have a lot of light in the room, let the air circulate. If you have less stuff, there's more light, everybody can get around easily and it's not dangerous. Corners on tables and things like that are dangerous at any age, at any age. Trying to make sure there's enough room around them is so important.

Zoe Kim (18:42):
And my mom is very young. She actually still works full-time. She's a nurse anesthetist. We're ahead of the game here.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (18:48):
I just think it's so wonderful you built that home for your mom. And that's really a gift to her. And I want to talk about gifts because often, we encounter older adults who want to give things to their adult kids or their grandchildren. And the adult kids say, "I don't want it." Just say yes, and then it's yours and you can do with it what you want because now it's yours. Accept it with gratitude because they're giving it to you because they think it's really useful and that it might help you. Saying yes makes them happy, it keeps things moving forward, and I love that you wrote that in your book.

Zoe Kim (19:21):
There are certain people that gift giving is their love language, and so that's how they love is by giving gifts. What do you think, though, about the relationships where the parent comes over to the adult child's house and says, "Where is that gift I gave you?"

Marty Stevens-Heebner (19:37):
I get asked that a lot. And what I say is here's the thing, you need to gently tell them that, "I really appreciated that you gave that to me. I can't really make use of it. And I know you want it to be useful, so I gave it to a friend, donated it because I want it to go to somebody who's really going to cherish it as much as you did."

Zoe Kim (19:56):
I think that's excellent.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (19:57):
And before they can say anything else, redirect the conversation. "Doesn't that food smell good?" Or "Let's watch the ballgame. Oh, here come the kids." Something like that to redirect the energy.

Zoe Kim (20:08):
Also, on the gift giving topic, it's okay to let your family members know ahead of time that you're in the process of simplifying. You're not saying rudely, "Don't get me anything. We're going to have a fight if you do." It doesn't have to go there. What's more important, the stuff or the relationship? The relationship is more important, so you always want to do everything with respect. But it does go a long way for many people to let them know ahead of time that you are simplifying. And if that is the type of relationship where maybe you could give them a short list of things that you'd actually find useful and helpful and they would be happy to get you something on that list. Having those conversations ahead of time can save a lot of heartache.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (20:49):
That's so smart, especially at the holidays are when birthdays are coming along or if you've just moved into the neighborhood and you're going to have a housewarming or something like that. I love how you put in the book, your presence is our present. A wonderful way to put it so that they know presents aren't required, but some people really enjoy doing that.

Zoe Kim (21:07):
If you have a close family member and you're doing Christmas and you just have this influx of stuff, you can let them know and then give them ideas for practical experience gifts, consumables so that it's not so much pressure and they get to give you a gift.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (21:21):
Or you can ask them to donate to an organization in Louisville.

Zoe Kim (21:24):
Yeah, that's true.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (21:25):
Like for a birthday or something like that, or an anniversary. Overall, what's the toughest part of your job?

Zoe Kim (21:31):
The hardest part would be working online. I love to work in person with people. And I'm very hands-on and visual, so I miss that experience. I don't go into people's homes very often, and I mostly do everything online.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (21:47):
You're a busy mom, that's for sure.

Zoe Kim (21:49):
Yes, that's true too.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (21:51):
You got a lot going on. And plus, you have that incredible following on Facebook and Instagram. And your website is wonderful. And of course, it's very clear and simple. Go to raisingsimple.com.

Zoe Kim (22:03):
I'm actually having it redone soon, so I'm very excited. It's going to be amazing.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (22:07):
Oh, that's so great. Congratulations. Go visit raisingsimple.com or visit Zoe on Instagram. Again, it's Raising Simple; same thing with Facebook. And above all, read her book, Minimalism for Families, because I've been doing this for 10 years and I got so many great ideas out of it, so I really encourage your people to read that. It's wonderful.

Zoe Kim (22:26):
Wonderful.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (22:27):
Thank you so much for being here with me today, Zoe. I really appreciate it.

Zoe Kim (22:34):
Thank you so much for having me.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (22:34):
Thank you so much for listening to How to Move Your Mom and Still Be Speaking Terms Afterward. Please visit howtomoveyourmom.com for more information about this episode and for additional podcast episodes featuring other extraordinary guests and conversations. Until next time, this is your very grateful host, Marty Stevens-Heebner.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (00:00):
I recently did my own closet audit and some other decluttering. Just like my clients, I find certain things laden with stories and memories difficult to let go of, even when I don't use them. Fortunately, at my industry's national conference, I came across a wonderful new company to help with items that I and you want to let go of, without losing those stories. On this episode, I get to talk to the creators of this easy to use and brilliant solution.

(00:33):
Moving your mom or your dad or yourself isn't just about moving things from one place to another. It is much more complicated than that, as are so many things having to do with later life. How to Move Your Mom and Still be on Speaking Terms Afterward provides in-depth conversations with professionals, older adults, and their family members who share their stories with warmth, understanding, and humor. I'm your host, Marty Stevens Heebner. Here you'll find answers to many of your questions, as well as different perspectives that I hope will inform and inspire you.

(01:12):
I am so lucky to have here with me today the two co-founders of this amazing new platform called Artifcts. I have Ellen Goodwin and Heather Nickerson here with me, and they are just terrific people. Welcome. Thank you so much for this interview. Let me tell you a little bit about them. Prior to co-founding Artifcts, Ellen Goodwin served as Chief Solutions Officer of NOMA, managing NOMA's strategic client engagements and working to drive their product roadmap. Prior to that, Ellen served as an intelligence analyst with the Central Intelligence Agency. She served for more than a year as a briefer to a cabinet level official. Ellen holds a BA in business and economics from the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire and a Masters of Public Policy from Duke University.

(01:57):
Her co-founder, Heather Nickerson, prior to co-founding Artifcts, served as the Chief Growth and Strategy Officer of Red Five Holdings and President of Red Five Privacy Labs, driving corporate growth and pursuing new entrepreneurial lines of business. Before that, Heather served as an intelligence analyst with the Central Intelligence Agency, including serving as a briefer in a war zone tour in Afghanistan, where the only body armor that would fit her was child sized. Is that right, Heather? Heather holds a BA in international relations from Brown University and a Masters of economics from the London School of Economics. You have such impressive backgrounds, it's unbelievable. I'm going to start out with the first question I always ask, what's your favorite memory of your grandparents?

Ellen Goodwin (02:45):
One of my fondest memories was of my grandfather, who would drive from Chicago up to visit us in Wisconsin. He was a male carrier, and he'd bring with him a little pouch of coins that he had that was a United States Postal Service pouch. It would have pennies and nickels. He would teach us how to play blackjack, poker, and hearts. I wasn't even counting at the time, but I would learn to count. I would check with my siblings on my math and show my cards. This is one of my fondest memories.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (03:15):
That's so great. Thank you. Heather, how about you?

Heather Nickerson (03:19):
One of my favorite memories is of my mother's mother, who I called Nana. Nana had a date bread recipe that she would bake every holiday season. She would only ever bake this for the holidays. My mother tried repeatedly to replicate the recipe, but I don't think my Nana ever gave her all the ingredients because my mother's bread was always really dry, and Nana's was amazing. It was moist and delicious. I think I probably ate half the bread in lieu of any other food during the actual holiday meal. It was awesome. I can still picture it to this day. I wish I knew what actually went into it.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (03:56):
You're making me hungry. That recipe, if you had it, would be perfect for Artifcts. Before I do anything else, let me say Artifcts.com, it's spelled uniquely, A-R-T-I-F-C-T-S. There's no "A" in the "facts" part of "artifacts." We have the link to Artifcts on our website. It's just wonderful. I tried it out this weekend, and it is so easy to use. They have training videos on YouTube. I didn't need them, it was that straightforward. What is the focus of Artifcts? What do you feel that it does for people?

Heather Nickerson (04:33):
The goal of Artifcts, Marty, is really simple. It's to help people capture, preserve, and share their history, stories, and memories behind all their stuff. That could be kid art that your child or grandchild made, or it could be a priceless family heirloom. Right now, without Artifcts, there's really no good way to connect the story, the history, the memory with the actual physical object. We created a space where people can combine stories and stuff, connect with family across generations, and really ensure that it all lives on in one place.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (05:07):
That's so wonderful. Can you please explain how it works? What's the process?

Heather Nickerson (05:13):
We've tried to make it as simple as possible. There's four easy steps. The hardest one is choosing which object to start with first.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (05:20):
[inaudible 00:05:20]

Heather Nickerson (05:23):
People are always like, "Where do I start?" Pick an object, step one. Step two is take a photo. You could also add audio or video, but start with a single photo. Step three is adding the story. It could be five words, "My mother gave me this," end of story. It could be 500 words or more. I'm very guilty of writing those long stories. Then step four is you upload, save, and you're done. You've created your first artifact in four really simple steps. But there's so much more you can do after that. We've built in a ton of functionality, everything from QR codes to being able to export your Artifcts to your home insurance policy or your estate plan, even the ability to add, "What do you want to happen with this item next? Who's going to get it when you're no longer here, or where's it going to go?" There's a lot you can do with your Artifcts once you've created them and saved them to the platform.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (06:16):
What's great in terms of sharing is you can keep them completely private. You can choose to share them with family members, friends, whomever you want to individually share them with. You can also, with certain Artifcts, go public, especially with things that are related to history.

Ellen Goodwin (06:31):
One of the things you mentioned at the very beginning about our background with the agency, privacy, and security is the only way you can live by that as a product is to say, "Leave it all private." Actually, it's private by default. You have to actually take action in order to share. That's also why you can try it for free. Create five Artifcts, see what you think. Heather and I both make a lot of our Artifcts public so people can see and learn about us and about the product. I took my grandfather's silver ring, I Artifcted it, and I shared it to Facebook with a Korean War veterans group. The reason is the only thing I could learn from the ring itself was that it was marked with the word "Seoul."

Marty Stevens-Heebner (07:12):
You mean Seoul like the city, correct?

Ellen Goodwin (07:14):
That's correct. It had [inaudible 00:07:16] on it. On the inside, it had a year and the marking that it was made of silver. But my grandmother didn't know anything about the ring. We found it at the bottom of an open box of my father's report cards from elementary school that he received. I had people from Seoul directly contact me through Facebook to tell me what they thought about the ring. Then other veterans just said that they were happy to see it.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (07:39):
That's remarkable. A pewter platter I inherited from my dad was used in 1777 to serve hot cakes to George Washington's army at Valley Forge, and I will be Artifcting that.

Ellen Goodwin (07:53):
This is where personal history and our nation's history merge. It's really great to be able to uncover that.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (08:00):
I know there's a great story, Heather, about your boots.

Heather Nickerson (08:03):
That's true. When we talked at the NASM conference, I think we talked about the hiking boots. Artifcts don't have to be historically relevant or have monetary value. They don't have to be significant in any way, shape, or form other than they mean something to you. The first Artifct I created when Ellen and I first built the platform was an Artifct of my beloved hiking boots. You can search on Artifcts.com, search for hiking boots, they'll pop up. My boots have been with me for well over a decade. They have tracked thousands of miles. I'm an avid hiker. They've gone from North America, Central America, Europe, even in Afghanistan. They were, until three years ago, falling apart at the seams. They were hideous to look at. They're caked in mud, they're well worn.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (08:48):
Can I just say they're well loved?

Heather Nickerson (08:50):
Very well loved. For me, they are the one item if something happened to me tomorrow, I'd want my daughter to know the story behind these boots. That's why I Artifcted them. Part of that story is very special. My husband, before he got married, offered to buy me a new pair of boots because we were going to go hiking on our honeymoon. I broke down in tears and I was like, "No, these boots have to last through our honeymoon." I got them right before Afghanistan. In my mind, these are the bookends, it's Afghanistan. Then getting married and going on the honeymoon, that's a really good bookend for these boots. But they have to last that long. He knew there was no way these boots were ever going to last that long. I came home one night and found the boots up on his workbench with pliers and all sorts of things. He was super gluing the soles back onto the boots so I could wear them hiking in Italy. One of the many things I'd want my daughter to know about me, my history, and why I love these boots so much.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (09:40):
They literally traveled through your history with you, and what a romantic thing for him to do. He's a keeper, just saying.

Heather Nickerson (09:48):
Yes, he is.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (09:49):
Not only do Artifcts not have to have any monetary value or anything like that, they don't have to look pretty. My dad's World War II Navy bombing jacket, I wore it a lot when I was in graduate school. The leather is not in great shape. But I'm definitely Artifcting that because it's such an important part of my family history. They don't have to look pretty. Just show them off and tell the story. What do you guys really love about what you do? Obviously, you love that you are enabling people to share their stories, even if they're letting go of those items, like I will be.

Heather Nickerson (10:24):
One of the things I love most is when we hear from our members who may be in a downsizing situation, they're moving or going through life's events. For them, stuff becomes a burden. When we hear from them, "You've helped me keep the memories, let go of the items," or, "My family didn't know the story of whatever this item was, and now they do. They want to keep. It's going to stay in the family." You're keeping that story alive for the next generation to come.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (10:47):
Especially for this generation of older adults who survived the Depression and World War II, or were born immediately afterward and had that pressure from their parents, it's so hard to let go of items. I think more, it's the memories they're concerned about disappearing and the stories. This is such a great way to preserve all that. It allows them to find a way and the resolve to let go of it after they've been able to just tell that story, and knowing that it will be preserved.

Ellen Goodwin (11:14):
I think that one of the joys for us is watching how the act of Artifcting across generations really opens up conversations. I actually published with Heather an article about Artifcting with my mother. I went home, and we Artifcted together for five days. I had made a list of things I wanted her to Artifct. When she reviewed the list, about half of them she thought, "Yes, great story. Let's talk about this." The other half, she says, "I don't know, Ellen. I picked it up at a garage sale." I said, "Hold on," because I had my own memories associated with the item. She was going to chuck it, but I wanted the item because of my own story. I got to share with her my own version of its history. We hear people who are like, "I'm less lonely because I'm provoking my adult sons by sending them Artifcts, and they're calling me to talk about them," or, "I've invited my granddaughter over to Artifct with me." It's that connection and that discussion, opening up the door to having conversations. You don't need prompts. The object prompts you.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (12:12):
My staff finds it fascinating when they're working with people in their homes, going through their various belongings. They get to find out the story of the person through their objects, especially if somebody has passed away. That's a way for us to learn a bit about their stories.

Heather Nickerson (12:27):
You start talking about stuff, you very quickly learn so much about them. They're suddenly sharing childhood memories or a family legend. That's been really fascinating.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (12:37):
What distinguishes Artifcts from, say Shutterfly or wherever you can store your photos and maybe a little bit of information about them?

Ellen Goodwin (12:46):
One of the things that people need to consider when they're picking the right platform for themselves is, are you putting onto a platform where they're going to compress and make the files smaller? If you're considering a Dropbox or a Google, you need to understand what the long-term cost is and what will they do with what you put in it. Someday, you take that photo out, you want to enlarge it, and you can't because it's been compressed. It's too small. Or are you putting it into a photo book builder or a storybook builder, it's a proprietary platform that will change over time, and there isn't a guarantee that what you created will still be there. I've had this happen with calendars I've made for my parents. I did it for years. Now they're all gone because that template is no longer supported. It wasn't designed to be my permanent storage of that calendar.

(13:33):
At Artifcts, the entire point here is it will continue living on because we're going to make sure it does. If we're going to change any kind of format, template, or anything, we're going to make sure all of your content lives on with it. You have to pick the platform that will allow you to preserve what you're trying to preserve.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (13:48):
You'll notice that different platforms, Zoom, Google, Shutterfly, they update and upgrade what they've built on the web, and what you just said happens. There's so many photos, they start compressing them, so there's a lot of pixelation. They don't save the templates, they don't save the information. Your goal is to preserve that for generations to come. This is what Artifcts is for.

Ellen Goodwin (14:12):
We like to say that we're building human media 1.0 because this isn't social media. This isn't about follow counts, view counts, emoticons, and ads. All of that, we very purposefully have removed. We're trying to get to know each other on a very human level. That's what this enables, where you can build a circle of friends and you can share what means most to you and who you are.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (14:32):
Also, with the generations, they start to realize how much they have in common.

Ellen Goodwin (14:36):
That's right.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (14:37):
You had mentioned how you can use these for your estate plan. One of the things I talk about on every episode is please set up a plan. Set up a plan. It makes such a difference not only for your loved ones as you get older, but also, because you'll feel more secure. Let's talk more about involving Artifcts in estate planning.

Heather Nickerson (14:57):
Yes. We have made it super simple to allow you to use Artifcts as you work through your estate plan or your will. It's the click of a button. You can export either an individual Artifct or your entire collection over to your estate planner or your attorney. But also, when you go to create the Artifct, if you know the value, you can enter that range in. You can also designate what happens to this object next. If you choose to bequeath it to someone, you can put the name in and their contact info. If you choose to donate it, you can even specify where you want the item to be donated. If you want it to be sold... One of the biggest questions sometimes is some of them passes away, and then what are you supposed to do with this stuff? That's what happened to my mother. She had an estate plan, that was the easy part. The hard part was on page 23 with all other tangible assets divided equally among three children. What do you do with that?

(15:46):
It's been one of our goals to ensure that Artifcts can help people in those situations ensure that their stuff and their stories get passed down. Another feature we have is sometimes they may not know the value. If you're an Artifcts member, we have a really great feature called "What's it Worth?" We've partnered with Heritage Auctions, one of the largest collectibles auctions house in the US. You click the button, and you send the Artifct information over to Heritage. Within five to seven business days, they will send you back a valuation that helps you make a decision. The best part is rather than having that valuation get lost in an email, we custom-built the integration so it's attached right back into your Artifct. You send them the Artifct, a week later, they send you back the valuation. It's right in your Artifct.

Ellen Goodwin (16:29):
That's right. This is a conversation that has to be had, and a lot of people aren't having it. This is in part why we have the field in the future. They're going to see it every time they Artifct or they edit their Artifct. They'll remember, "What am I going to do with this?" First, we want you to pause and think, "What does this thing mean to me?" Then maybe think about the future so that it becomes something that isn't a burden. It's a source of connection, it's a source of intergenerational wealth transfer. It can be so much more than an object.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (16:55):
That also helps for insurance purposes.

Ellen Goodwin (16:57):
When you say Insuretech, we're also working our way towards that. Are you underinsured? Are you sure that your homeowner's policy and any addendums actually cover what you have? If you lost that ring, you had a home fire, you can send these Artifcts to your insurance agent and say, "Here you go. Start processing the claim."

Marty Stevens-Heebner (17:14):
It's so important to have that all documented because your insurance broker wants to get you compensated. But they have to deal with the behemoth they work for, who doesn't want to have to deal with that. There are so many different kinds of people who can benefit from this: family members, friends, possibly historical societies too. What do you guys think?

Ellen Goodwin (17:37):
We have yet to find someone who can't benefit from Artifcts. We didn't expect artists to come calling because we thought artists would want to put their artwork where they could sell it. All of a sudden, we had all these artists coming to us. Why? It's because they could have a private portfolio where they're storing many versions. They're creating these pieces and attaching original documents to them. They're attaching the videos. We even have folks using the QR code feature. Once you Artifct, you can print a QR code. They're putting it on the wall in a gallery showing, or they're putting it into the certificate of authenticity. You buy that photo, you can always scan the QR code, and up pops the story of that photo that you purchased. These kinds of unexpected things come up all the time.

(18:17):
I did a story sharing event with the Daughters of American Revolution. These women, who love heritage, family history, genealogy, a lot of them have hundreds of files on their computer about their genealogical research. But connecting the dots to understand this photo of the homestead goes with this gentleman, and here's his documentation when he immigrated the US, they're all separate files. Nothing's linking them together to convey this is the family story. We are finding that we have an accidental synergy with folks that are very interested in preserving literally national history, sometimes global history.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (18:51):
I love that bit about the artists. We work with a lot of clients who have been artists, watercolorists, painters. They never sold their art. It was really a hobby. How much more wonderful to have a story behind each painting. I painted this when my niece was eight years old. It was hot out, and she didn't enjoy it, or I had to feed her chocolate all the time.

Ellen Goodwin (19:16):
Having not just the photo in the story, but you can have audio or video of you telling that story.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (19:20):
What a gift to give your grandparents to get closer to them, to sit down with them, "I want to learn all about this story, grandma or grandpa. Here, tell it to me, and I want to preserve it."

Heather Nickerson (19:32):
At the very beginning, the launch of our company, we had a grandmother and granddaughter pair an Artifct together. They spent two weeks, essentially. The granddaughter was home from school before going back to college. Grandma was like, "Come on over. I got all this stuff." After two weeks, grandma had created just under 200 Artifcts with her granddaughter. She was in tears because, "Even my grown sons don't know this much about me. This is my life story through stuff." The granddaughter was amazed. She uncovered all these histories about grandma, the fact that she lived overseas in Africa and not only went on safari, but sometimes had to go hunting to get food or to protect the family. It was crazy stuff.

(20:13):
You may take for granted that you've known someone your entire life. But they never had the moment to stop and ask, "Hey, grandma, why do you have this eight foot python snake skin sitting in your cabinet? Tell me the story behind that." Through the objects, the stories came out. Both were actually in tears in telling us about their experience. They're already making plans to do it again on the next break.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (20:33):
Ultimately, life really is about those stories and the connections between people. In addition to the different kinds of people that can use this, there's also so many different reasons to use it. It can be for historical purposes, and also, after someone's passed, perhaps in remembrance.

Ellen Goodwin (20:50):
This is something that our members brought to us, the idea of Artifcts in lieu of flowers. We had a mother with a young son who died in a car crash come to us with this idea. In those moments of grief, you're trying to process a lot. While people might come to you with stories, or they'll write them into books that they have at a memorial service or online, you might not be ready for them in the moment. You can easily have someone create a free Artifct and share it with you that captures a moment of your loved one's history that you didn't even know about.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (21:20):
Once you finish Artifcting, you can go in. Not only can you add to it, you can edit it.

Heather Nickerson (21:25):
A lot of parents are using it to deal with all the kid stuff. Think about all the stuff that comes to the front door every single day. How many watercolored rainbows do I need for my five-year-old? As they get older, you get graduation stuff, prom stuff, and the list goes on and on. It's an awesome way to capture your living life. Whatever comes in that front door, whether it be a piece of pottery shaped like a pizza slice made in art class, the graduation program, or the recital pamphlet. All of that can easily be Artifcted. You get to capture your child in that moment in time. We all know how fast they change. It's building a virtual time capsule for your child when they're older.

Ellen Goodwin (22:05):
Otherwise, you have 10,000 photos and you're like, "I don't even know what that was anymore. Why did I take a picture of it?" If instead, you ask your child, "What was this?" You just record them saying it, attach it to the Artifct, and off you go, now you actually it.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (22:18):
Another thing that I really love about Artifcts is that you offer a training and setup package to teach people how to use it and to help them set up their accounts so they understand it. You have your training videos too on YouTube. Plus, you have those checklists for people who are doing it for different reasons like travel, genealogy, or insurance. That's so helpful.

Ellen Goodwin (22:37):
That's taken directly from the ARTI community. We started watching trends. What were people Artifcting, what were people asking us about? We just put them into checklists because so many of our folks that would write into us were saying, "I know I can Artifct anything, but can you give me a headstart?" Those ideas came straight from the ARTI community.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (22:55):
The most important thing is just start doing it.

Ellen Goodwin (22:57):
Walk by your bookshelf, pick up something that means anything to you, and just try it. You'll see how easy it is, and it'll inspire you to keep going. They tell us, "I finally did my first Artifct on Monday morning. I'm 10 Artifcts later. I was late for my meeting, and I had to stop."

Marty Stevens-Heebner (23:11):
It just shows how wonderful it is to do and fascinating, the things you discover, especially as you're downsizing, decluttering, and finding that thing at the back of the closet and going, "I didn't know where that was."

Heather Nickerson (23:24):
We had one of our members go through his own downsizing process. He was going from a 3,600 square foot house all the way down to a 1,200 square foot condo. In his Artifcting process, he was able to Artifct high school homecoming pictures, yearbooks, letter jackets, and then all the kids stuff. He was able to let go of the items, then take what mattered most with him to his new space, but then keep the memories of everything else, and share it with his grown children and share it with his siblings. It was this whole very good and positive process, which could have been a really tough moment of having to literally cut your living space in half. He made a really positive experience out of it with Artifcts.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (24:07):
Very cathartic for him too, I'm sure. It's the stories and the memories that we're concerned about losing. What a wonderful company you've created. Again, it's Artifcts.com, A-R-T-I-F-C-T-S. Artifcts.com, go check it out. It's just wonderful. Thank you both so much for joining me on this episode. It's been wonderful talking with you.

Heather Nickerson (24:31):
Thank you so much, Marty, for having us. We really appreciated the conversation.

Marty Stevens-Heebner (24:36):
Thank you so much for listening to How to Move Your Mom and Still be on Speaking Terms Afterward. Please visit HowtoMoveYourMom.com for more information about this episode and for additional podcast episodes featuring other extraordinary guests and conversations. Until next time, this is your very grateful host, Marty Stevens- Heebner.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
You've heard me mention in a couple of episodes that my company, Clear Home Solutions is a senior and specialty move management company. There's a whole association full of us and rather than have me blab on and on about what I do and who we are, I am lucky enough to have the co-executive directors of the National Association of Senior and Specialty Move Managers, otherwise known as NASMM. Stay tuned.

Moving your mom or your dad or yourself isn't just about moving things from one place to another. It is much more complicated than that, as are so many things having to do with later life. How to move your mom and still be on speaking terms afterward, provides in depth conversations with professionals, old adults and their family members who share their stories with warmth, understanding, and humor. I'm your host, Marty Stevens-Heebner, and here you'll find answers to many of your questions as well as different perspectives that I hope will inform and inspire you. Mary Kay and Jennifer, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

MARY KAY BUYSSE:
Thanks for having us.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
This has been a long time in the making, at least in my head. And I want to tell you a little something about Mary Kay and Jennifer and you'll find out why they're so near and dear to my heart. They are the co-executive directors of the National Association of Senior and Specialty Move Managers. I am honored that I just became president of our association. It's about thousand members both nationally and internationally. So a little bit about them.
Mary Kay Buysse is NASMM's co-executive director since 2006. She guides membership recruitment, education program development and day-to-day operations for NASMM. With the master of science degree in gerontology. Mary Kay has worked in the nonprofit association sector for 24 plus years. Prior to joining NASMM, she was a case manager for an area agency on aging in the Chicago area where she now lives and later served as director of program development for leading age Illinois.
Jennifer Picket has served as NASMM's co executive director since 2006. They started together. Jennifer oversees NASMM's day-to-day operations and membership services as well as the development and marketing of NASMM services, creative work and programs, which includes NASMM's annual conference and expo. And for both of you, I know that's a massive job. Jennifer brings over 30 years of non-profit management expertise and years of marketing, creative and event planning experience to NASMM and she's worked in a non-profit segment of aging services association management for nearly three decades. Thank you both. I'm so glad you're here. We get to talk about all this, but of course the first question is always, what's your favorite memory of your grandparents?

MARY KAY BUYSSE:
My mom's dad, my grandpa O'Neill and my grandmother had died in 1965. He passed away in 1969 and in those four years he just threw himself into our life. We had a little baby in our house and so my mom asked him to take us to school to pick us up from school and I'll never forget, I told him I was taking up volleyball and I came home from school one day and he had bought 13 volleyballs for me because he was sure that the best way to practice was to be able to let the ball go to the other side. I could practice on my own and then I could practice for a long time. So we had 13 volleyballs in our small house for quite a long time.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Isn't that just like a grandparent, Jennifer, how about you?

JENNIFER PICKETT:
Yeah, I was blessed to have four grandparents for a good portion of my life and they couldn't have been more polar opposite. My dad's parents were the country club and golf and shopping grandparents and my mom's parents were the blue collar hunting, fishing, gardening, baking grandparents. So it was basically the best of both worlds. Chocolate chip cookies and apple pies on one end and always going shopping for my birthday with my grandmother and going to the golf course into the country club and swimming and all of that. They were really great. My parents were very much like my grandparents. So all good.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Both have such great memories of your grandparents. That's lovely. So let's talk about NASMM, the National Association of Senior and Specialty Move Managers. This is the work that I do, but instead of boring everybody with me talking nonstop, I would love to have you guys talk about what this whole movement is about taking care of people and their personal property because there's just so many emotions attached to this sort of thing.

MARY KAY BUYSSE:
We like to say we move people, not just boxes. We have a lot of great moving companies who are allied partners of NASMM and they do a fantastic job of moving those boxes. But where move managers come in are the weeks and months prior to the move and of course then those days and weeks after the move, the resettlement piece of it is just as important. So that takes a combination of soft skills and hard skills. That's what really makes the move manager unique and so needed in today's society.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
That's interesting because you mentioned soft skills. To me, something like empathy is a hard skill because you can learn technically how to pack a box and label it properly and how to organize things. But when it comes to dealing with someone with dementia or as we know, the unusual family dynamics we often encounter, you have to be able to step in not only one other person's shoes, but maybe the shoes of three or four other people and look at it from those perspectives. And you really can't teach that. I suppose somebody can learn empathy over a couple of years, but you got to have that before you start in this business. Don't you think?

MARY KAY BUYSSE:
Empathy can't be taught? We've been so fortunate that the people who are attracted to this field just self-select. It's a great community of professionals because they come into this with a desire to help older adults and that's not something everyone can do. We can teach you how to estimate, we can teach you how to do that first client consultation. We can teach you how to market your business, but really you've got to come to us with a desire to help older adults and the patience and understanding that goes along with that.

JENNIFER PICKETT:
I think obviously having compassion and being empathetic, but you have to be able to listen. That is probably the number one skill is really hearing the client. You have to have a desire to work with older adults and you also have to have the gumption to be a small business owner. We have seen people that have come into this segment from more of a social service background who clearly have a desire to support and work with older adults and their families, but are terrified to make a speech in front of their rotary club or something like that. So it's a two pronged approach. You have to have all of these soft skills that really can't be taught and you have to have the hard skills that can be taught, but you also have the courage to start a business and to run a business and everything that goes into becoming a small business owner.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Being an entrepreneur is a unique proposition. People will say to me, oh, that's so great. You run your own business, you can make your own schedule. Yeah, 24/7. I make my own schedule.

MARY KAY BUYSSE:
It's hard for people to make that leap. As Jennifer said, for people who've maybe been in social work or nursing all these years.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
For people who are nervous about sales and marketing, if you are at all salesy when you go to meet with someone, you are out the door. The lovely thing is we just say what we can do for them and then they just make the decision.

MARY KAY BUYSSE:
Well, the rise in move management I think speaks to the sort of unicorn that a move manager is. It's a kaleidoscope of skills and so we're seeing such an increase in families reaching out to our move manager saying, hey, we need help. We want an expert. We want someone who does this day in and day out.

JENNIFER PICKETT:
And I think many times with families, there's a real misunderstanding of how much work this really is. You cannot come in and downsize mom and dad who've been in their home for 48 years, in 48 hours. It just doesn't happen. In fact, it's irresponsible to think that can happen. The stress of a poorly handled move can really send that older adult into a downward spiral.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
If somebody has just a bit of dementia. It's extraordinary how much that can increase if the shift to the new home in assisted living isn't handled well because it becomes so unfamiliar. They know they're under stress for some reason that can't really figure it out. And so it really helps to make sure that the new home and assist living is set up with their favorite things that are familiar to kind of ease that move.

MARY KAY BUYSSE:
Under the most ideal circumstances. Transition is hard at any age. Add on someone who hasn't moved in 40 or 50 years, add on some diagnoses, whether it's dementia or Parkinson's. You add all that together. It is a daunting challenge for any family. It's really such a win-win business model. It helps the families, it helps the older adults and it helps these compassionate entrepreneurial people operating their own small businesses in the local community where it's very customized to the family's wishes, to the older adults wishes.

JENNIFER PICKETT:
There's so much loss that is associated with aging, loss of the spouse, loss of cognitive abilities, physical abilities. You get to the point where now it's time to move downsize. It's not uncommon for an older adult who's experienced a lot of loss to just say, I'm not doing this. This is too much. Because in so many ways our stuff defines us. The hallmark of senior move management is that our members help their clients start with the possessions without parting with the memories and help them get through this major transition, which they know in most circumstances will enhance their quality of life. If they've toured and had lunch and looked at an apartment and they're sitting with the marketing director or the moving coordinator and they're like, this is lovely, but I'm not ready. I'm not ready means I don't know how I'm going to move 10 pounds of potatoes into a five pound bag.
It's completely overwhelming even though they know that this is what they want to do. The great thing about move management, it doesn't have to be an all or nothing proposition. A move manager can work with you over many weeks or months cleaning up the spare bedrooms that really haven't been touched since the kids moved out, and we're going to do that in July and in August we're going to do the bookcase, it's a curio cabinets or what have you. But over that time, the move manager is establishing a relationship with their client and they're breaking down the barriers that will keep a client from moving and they can quickly help this client assimilate to their new chapter in a environment that is safe and comfortable for them.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
And where they'll make new friends.

JENNIFER PICKETT:
Exactly.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Somebody else gets to do the cooking for you. Somebody else cleans. If someone just sneeze, they're checking you out.

MARY KAY BUYSSE:
Speaking to the adult children. As someone who went through this personally, it's a great opportunity for the adult children to be that loving son and/or daughter and be along the path with their parent during this transition as a source of comfort. Whereas if the adult children choose to become the project manager of the move, then they become the bad guy. There's a lot of really tough conversations where there's hurt feelings. The parent feels like they're the child and now the adult child is the parent. And there there's all these complex feelings. Adult children bring some baggage to the table, maybe stuff that they've held back about their parents. All this comes to the fore. Why not just hire someone who's expert at this? And then they can be their parents loving sons and daughters.

JENNIFER PICKETT:
Because the moon manager, at the end of the day, the only horse in the race they have is the client. They're an objective third party who can deal out those family dynamics before things do take a turn. If it's about the 12 place settings of China that mom really wants the daughter to have and she's like, I have my own China. Find a solution for that China. If that means taking it and putting it in your basement for six months, then do it. With adult children, it's a new normal for them as well. These kids may be losing their childhood home where they remember their Christmases, they remember their proms or whatever. It can be such a stressful time for the entire family.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
It really is. People generally call it relocation. I call it dislocation because you're going to feel at joint until you're settled into that place. It's not like on move day, everything's fine. You need to get accustomed to it and you are sir, right Jennifer? The impact on the adult child is something nobody ever talks about.

MARY KAY BUYSSE:
And what I love most about our NASMM move managers is that it's not an all or nothing proposition. Tell us what your budget is and we'll tell you what we can do with that budget. Our NASMM move managers have an entire menu of services. You can pick and choose as much as the family needs or as little as the family needs. That's what a move manager can do and I love that piece of it because so many things in today's world is an all or nothing proposition. We can really affect change in your family at whatever level you can afford.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Our tagline at Clear Home Solutions is where compassion meets know-how, so we work efficiently, but we also know how to take that time to be respectful, especially when somebody has dementia or there's something else going on. If you want experts of this who are trained to carry insurance, whose staff are employees, they're not subcontractors. That's who we are. We get in there, we literally have a couple of projects they were after people died that went on for years because of family issues. A lot of us step into hoards and handle that, which is fascinating because it's always a treasure hunt when you're doing this work, but when it's a hoarding situation, it also becomes an archeological dig. You just don't know what you're going to find.

JENNIFER PICKETT:
When you're downsizing from 2,500 square feet and you're going to maybe 750 square feet. Yeah, the move is really the smallest art. It's everything else that needs to be done before the truck comes. The thing about move management is that they will come in and do the space planning for your new residents. They will make it crystal clear what fits. So then the process of what's not going to fit crystallizes the Move Manager brings great tools. There's so much technology now.

MARY KAY BUYSSE:
It's not just what they do, which is an enormous amount. It's their Rolodex, if you will. If Mr and Mrs. Smith are going to call ABC Moving Company and they're 82 years old, ABC Moving Company will do their best no doubt. But that's a one off move. But if their Home Solutions calls on behalf of Mr. And Mrs. Smith and Clear Home Solutions has given ABC moving company 75 jobs a year over the last eight years. They want to make Clear Home Solutions, very happy customer service wise. The Rolodex is a living Rolodex and it's just chalk full with handyman and moving companies and junk callers and you name it Marty, you've got the giant Rolodex.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
They're more like spreadsheets now. They're huge. We have Art Restores, all these different resale outlets for people who want to try to sell their items. Plus we do online estate sales. We partner with Max Sold. The services run the gamut. We do everything from floor planning to sorting and downsizing. We make sure everything is packed properly and then we work with the moving company on move day.

JENNIFER PICKETT:
And I think too with moving companies to have that move manager who is their advocate throughout the process, they don't even have to talk to the driver. The move manager is going to step in and say, this is what's going to happen and this is how it's going to happen.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
We'll take care of everything and make it a turnkey situation during move day. And sometimes in subsequent days we pull the items out of the boxes and set up your new home. We try to make it a reflection of the home they've left behind making the bed. We organize the kitchen, put the toiletries out, so they just walk in and they can start living there. And then we go back and we clear out their previous home through estate sales auctions, donation pickups, so it's ready for sale for lease.

JENNIFER PICKETT:
And you probably also have relationship with realtors and handyman and staging companies.

MARY KAY BUYSSE:
We're so proud of the fact that our move managers are nimble. They're able to create moving plans quickly, efficiently, and successfully. We too are nimble in terms of offering the NASMM home course.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Let's talk about that a bit.

MARY KAY BUYSSE:
In response to all the data that's indicating that this gigantic cohort of people, the baby boom generation, we want to stay in their homes as long as physically possible. We can help our customers that way as well. It's not about moving anywhere, but it's using all of those same skills to help you stay at home in your current living environment and creating an all new environment without moving anywhere. And a lot of times it's decluttering, organizing and outfitting the home for some changes in mobility as well.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Talking about baby boomers, a lot of people don't realize that 10,000 baby boomers are turning 65 every single day. That started in 2012. It will continue until 2032.

MARY KAY BUYSSE:
And we talk about senior move management and we added specialty to our name because we're getting an influx of clients like we've never seen. It's all different kinds of people. We've seen a lot of massive relocations during the pandemic and after the pandemic where people are moving closer to family. It's military moves, it's lots of families with three or four children. So you've got a California to New Jersey move with three small children, you call a NASMM move manager. We've seen so much growth in our members' businesses because of all the different people who need move management services.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Can I just say too, we're a lot cheaper than therapy, trust me.

JENNIFER PICKETT:
Well, I was going to add to that list of the specialty moves are divorcing couples, college students.

MARY KAY BUYSSE:
It's very exciting to see all these other populations jumping on the bandwagon of using a move manager.

JENNIFER PICKETT:
We are growing. It's not the most expensive business to start. With the right training, you can definitely start a business that can become really successful. You case and point, we remember the first time we met you and look what you've been able to do.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
With a lot of support from you and other NASMM members. So at conference you get about 400 people. You will never be in a friendlier room in your life.

MARY KAY BUYSSE:
It's amazing.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
It's that empathy, the kind of person you need to be a move manager. And in general, I think to work well with older adults and their families, there has to be that patience, that inquisitiveness loving to listen to the stories because oh, do we hear stories? Especially when we're downsizing and that's great. We can work while we listen to stories. It's not a problem. Can we talk about how this all began? It's NASMM's 20th anniversary this year.

MARY KAY BUYSSE:
Oh, good organizations have that great starting story. It was in the early Os 2001, 2002. There were companies all over the country and everyone who was doing this thought they were the only ones in the whole country doing it. And through the magic of the internet in the early Os, they found each other online. Margaret Novak, our very first board president

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
And who was at previous episode at how to move your mom.

MARY KAY BUYSSE:
I think she found two dozen companies who were doing this literally from California to New York to Florida. She just asked whoever would be interested if they wanted to come together to her home in Philadelphia one weekend just to share some stories and to think about formalizing this professional field. And that's exactly what happened. Jennifer and I are just in awe of these early founders because they were trying to grow their own local business while creating the National Association.
We have to really give huge kudos to them for sacrificing a lot of their personal free time to develop this business. And then four years later, Jennifer and I were working for the Illinois LeadingAge affiliate. They asked us to formally start managing them. So we left our jobs with LeadingAge to join this amazing, exciting new venture. And we've never looked back. We're really proud of the work we've done and are proud of all of our members who've joined us on this journey. From 22 to over a 1,000 small business companies throughout the United States and somewhat internationally.

JENNIFER PICKETT:
Mary Kay and I worked side by side together for 23 years. We really understand aging services first and foremost. And we have positioned this profession as part of the continuum of aging services that it is what we would consider to be like a home and community based service. And it is a huge support for senior living communities. It's just going to continue to grow and we manage that growth by making sure that people who are coming into this profession are on the same page in terms of poor competencies, in terms of ethics, insurance requirements, you have to be a member of the National Association of Senior and Specialty Move Managers to call yourself a senior move manager.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Because that's trademarked.

JENNIFER PICKETT:
It's trademarked.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
It's been a long time since I first joined NASMM. I don't recall what the requirements are to become a NASMM member.

JENNIFER PICKETT:
NASMM has two levels of membership. Someone who is just joining the association joins as a provisional member, which means that they are a startup company or they've been in business for a while, but are to the point of realizing that, oh, I should be a member of NASMM. Once you join and pay your membership dues, you are required to produce proof of insurance. You have to take and pass our four cornerstone courses. These courses do not teach you how to become a move manager. But these are four areas that as an organization, we want all of our members on the same page in terms of our ethics, safety, understanding the moving industry and understanding contracts and liability and risk. Then the members have to have a live professional website, not like a Facebook page or anything like that. And part of that reason is because that's really their most valuable marketing real estate.
Seniors today, older adults are very tech savvy and are only getting savvier for sure. They're going to be looking at your website and you can bet that their adult children or grandchildren are going to be looking at these websites. And once you meet those requirements, the Cornerstone courses, the website and the proof of insurance, then you become a professional member of NASMM and that's when you are listed on our Find to Move manager map. Beyond that, there is the opportunity for certification. It's not something that you can just take a couple of classes and say you're certified. The NASMM certification, which is called Senior Manager certified or SMMZ is the only one of its kind in the country because it requires both knowledge and experience and that requires additional coursework and application fee and proof of 40 invoiced senior moves.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Am I less than humble brag is that I was actually the first certified senior move manager in the country. Okay, enough bragging.

JENNIFER PICKETT:
As you were. Yes, as you were. And then beyond that, once your company has been in business for at least five years and you conducted a minimum of 250 moves, you can apply for NASMM's a plus accreditation, which is really the highest standard. It's best practices in both small business ownership and senior move management operations and client services. It is a rigorous process. Clear Home Solutions holds a plus accreditation.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
We are the first one in Los Angeles County. Sorry, more bragging.

JENNIFER PICKETT:
So these are companies that are really invested in best practices in organizational and client services. Management are really committed to their own professional development as well. So there's a lot of information on the NASMM website and those are easily noted. We know that there are plenty of people who are doing this but not necessarily doing it right, not necessarily insured.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
One of the great things is somebody's moving out of state or coming to one's area. We share jobs from one end to the other.

MARY KAY BUYSSE:
That's a really big deal actually. I don't know about you Marty, but we're seeing it real increase across the country of long distance relocations.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Especially out of California. A lot of people are leaving California.

MARY KAY BUYSSE:
We're seeing it everywhere and we're seeing people who've done it in 2020. They're moving back in 2022. So it's just people are on the move at every age.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
They really are. And we can help people who are younger, that's not a problem. But our specialty, it's just white glove treatment. When I or one of my colleagues is talking to a potential client and sometimes they're embarrassed to say we are talking to other companies, which I encourage get to know different companies to see who you feel most comfortable with. And they are key questions to ask. Number one, are they a member of NASMM? Number two, do they carry liability insurance? Number three is anyone who's going to be working with them from Clear Home Solutions or whatever company you're working with, is that person an employee who don't want subcontractors? That's very important because you want to make sure that they carry workers' comp.

MARY KAY BUYSSE:
Jennifer and I have talked about this for years. One of the main reasons a lot of companies that say they're move managers don't join NASMM, I think is the insurance requirement. We definitely believe insurance is absolutely a hallmark of professionalism and I do think some people, when they are making a decision based entirely on cost, a good part of that professionalism is past aside until something goes very wrong.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
All it takes is one slip from that uninsured move manager or some subcontractor they've brought in to create a lawsuit against you because they're not caring worker's comp and they want to sue somebody for the injury.

MARY KAY BUYSSE:
Penny wise and pound foolish as my dear old dad would say.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
So here's a story about why you really need to make sure that you ask those questions of any move manager you're considering hiring or anyone who's going to be in your home handling all your stuff. Because we get in the drawers. We find all kinds of delightful things that sometimes we have to be a bit discreet about. But I remember one lovely client, she was such a sweetheart, she got a recommendation from her pastor for a couple at their church who ostensibly did this sort of thing and would help her. So they'd help themselves to every single valuable in her home. It was horrifying. This was such a lovely woman and it was from her church, her place of worship. You assume that anybody from there you can trust. But apparently this is this couple's thing. They go from place of worship to place of worship and insinuate themselves and take advantage. It's awful. So you do want to make sure that it is a real bonafide company.

MARY KAY BUYSSE:
That's one thing I hope more families understand as we head into our 21st year of the National Association of Senior and Specialty Move Managers, that the word gets out, that it is affordable, it's compassionate, expert service.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Thank you so much Jennifer and Mary Kay. Thank you for being here on How to Move Your Mom and helping to explain things with her early.

JENNIFER PICKETT:
Thanks for having.

MARY KAY BUYSSE:
Thanks for having us. We love to talk about move management.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
It's a thing we all love to talk about our stories.
Thank you so much for listening to How to Move Your Mom (and Still be on Speaking Terms Afterward). Please visit howtomoveyourmom.com for more information about this episode and for additional podcast episodes featuring other extraordinary guests and conversations. Until next time, this is your very grateful host, Marty Stevens-Heebner.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
In my line of work as a senior move manager, we work with clients and help them with their treasures of a lifetime, along with all the other stuff that goes with it. People sometimes ask me, How much do you think all this is worth? When it comes to appraising people's treasures, our next guest is the expert that they want to turn to.
Moving your mom or your dad or yourself isn't just about moving things from one place to another. It is much more complicated than that, as are so many things having to do with later life. How to Move Your Mom (and Still be on Speaking Terms Afterward), provides in depth conversations with professionals, older adults, and their family members who share their stories with warmth, understanding, and humor. I'm your host, Marty Stevens-Heebner, and here you'll find answers to many of your questions as well as different perspectives that I hope will inform and inspire you. Xiliary Twil, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

Xiliary Twil:
It's a pleasure to be here.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Let me tell you a little bit about Xiliary. Xiliary Twil founded Art Asset Management Group in 2009 as an accredited senior appraiser with the American Society of Appraisers. Xiliary serves as the valuation expert, as well as an art historian and an art collector. She successfully managed the business affairs of art galleries, private collections, and exhibited at international art fairs. So Xiliary, to start off, I wanted to ask you about your grandparents, but they had already passed by the time you were born, but you had a very big-

Xiliary Twil:
Family. My mother was one of 16 children, but not from the same parents. It was a blended family. And my father had six brothers and sisters. Right there, we have, what, 22 relatives.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Wow.

Xiliary Twil:
Who had children, so I had a lot of cousins. I was really blessed.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
And what's your favorite memory?

Xiliary Twil:
My best memories are spending time with my aunts and uncles. A group of my aunts and uncles had bought an old house in this tiny little town of maybe 50 people, and there was no running water. You had to go to the outhouse if you wanted to go to the bathroom. There was a pump in the kitchen. We all slept in the same room. We had all these old brass beds, single beds that we all would sleep in. And it was a cacophony of snoring and noises and it was hysterical. It was really a lot of fun.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
It was like a dormitory full of relatives.

Xiliary Twil:
Yeah, it was, and that was an amazing time.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Those sound like incredible memories. So let's now talk about yourself as an adult and the work that you do now. I describe what you do, but I'd rather have you specifically talk about your work and the services you offer.

Xiliary Twil:
We, Art Asset Management Group, are a boutique business. That means that what we do is custom designed for the client that I'm working with. We're valuation experts. We value personal property, and personal property includes everything that's tangible but not real estate. We don't value property or houses, but everything else we're capable of valuing. And we value for all intent and uses. That could be estate planning, it could be for a state tax purposes, it could be for insurance coverage, insurance claims, for charitable donations, it could be for a divorce. Anytime someone needs their assets valued that are personal property, not real estate, then we can be called in and do that valuation for them.
That's the basic premise of the business, but then we get involved in doing other projects. I work with one client who owns a former bank building. Two years ago we removed a 40 foot mosaic off of that building and three sculptures, and we donated them to Chapman University to the Hilbert Museum of California Art. And recently we just took a 40 foot stained glass window off the same building and we're in process of finding a home for that.
So there's times when I'm dealing with historical projects, I may be valuing large scale public art, which might be for a corporation's taxes. And then I'll do consulting and someone may have artwork that they want to sell, so I'll find out what is the best way to sell it, whether it be putting it up to auction or finding the gallery to consign it to or someone to buy it. So I act on my client's behalf on all of these different levels.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
I know it's very complicated, but you were just talking about determining where's the best place to try to sell something. How do you go about determining that?

Xiliary Twil:
I think it really depends on what the asset is. If you have a Picasso and you would like to sell it, depending on what it, is it a drawing? Or is it a painting? You would then determine is auction the best place? Or is it best to consign it? Or is it best to find someone to buy it privately? That is pretty easy. But then you get into the lower value works of art, which could be not a famous artist that is by someone that doesn't have an auction record. Then I have to determine is there a market for it? If there is, what is that? It could be a lesser known or lesser visible or lower priced auction house.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Let's be honest and realistic. If it's not a known artist, chances are it's better in an estate sale or something like that. Tell me if I'm wrong.

Xiliary Twil:
No, you're absolutely right. It's very difficult. I'm working on project right now. It's I think 95 works of art. They're in a corporation, but a lot of them have zero auction records. This is not going to the IRS, this is not going to court. There is certain situations where I will use a formula, this is the size, not a known artist, and boom, that's the price. But it's not easy. Even valuing expensive works of art is not always easy.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
It just always goes up and down the scale. It's like any kind of a market, like the stock market, what have you, there are just times when certain artists are more valued than others.

Xiliary Twil:
I read all the art blogs. They are rediscovering paintings. Recently they found van Gogh's what they consider to be his first self portrait, because he still had his left ear. Because he was so poor, he painted on top of maybe another canvas or a piece of cardboard. And this museum was doing some restoration, they always x-ray to see what's underneath. This x-ray showed that there was a portrait underneath this, so now they're trying to figure out how are they going to separate the two successfully. There was I think a Matisse that was just discovered under another one of his paintings.
Now because of the progress that we have made with x-ray, the testing of materials, there's a whole company that tests paint fleck and they're able to date the paint. There's these new discoveries. They can now backdate a lot of artwork. They are finding that a lot of the Italian Renaissance paintings are not the school of, they were actually done by that artist.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Science is amazing.

Xiliary Twil:
Yeah, it is. People think creativity is art and then there's science. Without the science, you can't figure out the history of all of these works, especially ancient works.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
I focused on ancient history when I was in undergrad, so I have a deep appreciation of ancient Greek sculpture and Egyptian, and I always say, "The Romans copied the Greek, so I'm not as interested."

Xiliary Twil:
That's great.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
A little mundane fact about Marty. But that is extraordinary and science and creativity really do go together, because so many scientific discoveries are as a result of someone thinking creatively and outside the box. Also, the thing that I've learned about art, what little bit I know, is there are people, they have that artist eye. It's just something they were born with and/or developed. They can really see in proportions and in a way it's scientific the way they go about looking at something and taking that and expressing it through paint or a drawing.

Xiliary Twil:
Well, look at da Vinci, if you look at his notebooks, he was inventing airplanes back in the day, parachutes, all of these different things he invented, but he was a really incredible artist.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
They go together. This is why I say we need to teach creative arts in schools, because it's called creative problem solving for a reason. We need to develop the parts of my brain. Okay, stepping off my soap box. Now let's talk about the selling of items, because obviously when you have the Picasso in the attic, that obviously goes to a Sotheby's or a Christie's or some other large auction house, so that it gets top dollar. Well, we were using the example of Picasso. Is it a drawing, is it a print? Is it an original work? Can you describe why those are valued differently? So you have the original painting, there's only one that exist.

Xiliary Twil:
One of a kind, that's where the value is. In the one of the kind, which is a painting, let's say an oil on canvas, typically that will be in any category across the board, the highest value of the three. Then you get drop down to a work on paper, which could be an actual watercolor on paper, it could be pastel on paper. Now watercolor and ink is called painting on paper, so that actually is a painting, but it's on paper, but they're lesser valued. Canvas has always been deemed the most valuable.
The canvas is a lot more sturdy. A canvas will endure, it can last longer. Hence, it has value. It's not as fragile as a work on paper. Work on paper could age. It could burn, meaning if it's framed improperly, the edges get brown. It could get mold. That's what those little spots are on works on paper. When you see little brown dots, that's mold.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Oh.

Xiliary Twil:
If it's around the edge, that is where the paper interacted with the gassing, the formula, the scientific aspect of the paper and the cardboard that they used to use to back that drawing and the wood in the frame. They all interact and release this gas that physically burns, singes the edge of the paper.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Talk about science right there. Wow.

Xiliary Twil:
That is totally science.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Because you heard this the stuff on Antiques Roadshow, but they don't really explain it the way that you just did.

Xiliary Twil:
If you see something that has a lot of brown spots on the surface, that's called foxing and it's mold. And you can get it on books, you can get it on canvas, but that's very rare. The paper can be torn, so it's much more fragile. And so paintings have always been considered the top valued item. Then you have your works on paper, whether it's painting on paper, could be a drawing, and then the lowest level is a print. Now that is not always true because it depends what that artist's most popular medium is. Andy Warhol made a gazillion prints, and they're worth a lot, but his paintings will always get the top dollar. Contemporary artists paintings bring a lot of money. The prints bring a lot of money, but not the 20 million that a painting will.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Yeah, art prices have just gone through the roof. And the thing with prints, and I had to learn this, you'll see numbers by the signature, which you'll say 23/100. That means it's a 23rd print out of 100. Is that correct?

Xiliary Twil:
For the most part, Marty.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Oh, okay. Please explain.

Xiliary Twil:
Here's the deal. A contemporary artist that is primarily well known and published by one of the really top publishing houses, that is true, it is one through 100, let's say. But people don't realize that there is another set of prints that are assigned either letters or numbers. People like Dali had a Arabic numbered portfolio. It's like one through a 100. They never did only a hundred, it was like 250, 300, 500. Then they had Roman numeral impressions, so it was one through 300 using Roman numerals.
So all of a sudden you have 300 Roman, 300 Arabic, you could have 800 of that one image on the market. People go, "I spent $25,000 for my Leroy Neiman, why is it only worth 3000?" And people don't know that. And Dali was incorrigible, who knows how many he made out of one image.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
But I bet he made a lot of money that way. So-

Xiliary Twil:
I think that he did.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
... there you go. Thinking about how long it takes to create an original painting and people don't have an appreciation of this. It takes such a long time, months and months and sometimes years to get that painting. Just the way that makes it remarkable.

Xiliary Twil:
And artists go back in and work on it maybe over a course of years. Wayne Thiebaud, California artist, very famous who just died last year, would do that. Maybe he worked on something in 1977 and he might not have released it, so he would put two dates on it. He would put 1977/2021 because that's when he actually finished it. So artists do that.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
But that makes sense, especially when you're dealing with something that visual that you need to take a step back from it. Because you get so in the weeds with those little brush strokes, and you almost can't see the painting anymore. That's fascinating. What do you love about what you do?

Xiliary Twil:
I like to come in and make a plan and figure out what our course of action is going to be. So that's what I love about the business and I guess I like to feel needed. I've worked with you, Marty, and you go into these homes and the people don't know what they have. It's chaos, because no one has put in place a plan. It's a bad time to make a decision about the art that you have in your house.
Your spouse just died, your parents, someone just died, and now you got to deal with all this stuff. And so I'm an organized person, as you are, and I like making lists and helping people figure out what do we do with this? Do we bring in someone like you to inventory everything like we did in that one case? Then I value it and then we decide do we sell everything? Do we donate it? I like people to get things in order, and I think that's the biggest thrill. I'm an art historian. I barely made it out of college with that degree. What can I tell you, I wasn't a great student.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
But you are sure an expert now.

Xiliary Twil:
It's crazy. It's like how did this happen? But I just diligently worked on it and now I found that this is my niche. Helping people, applying my studies and in some cases I go to homes and look at the most incredible artwork that you would only see in a museum. So it's like having a private tour through a museum. That's another great part of my business.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
I always say with the business that I am where we go in and we work with people's treasures and determine if are they moving? Are they going to age place? Is it a clear out as we call it? You can get a sense of the life that was lived there and learn the history of the family through the objects. What do you wish people knew about what you do?

Xiliary Twil:
That's a good question. I just wish people understood. When people decide to get an appraiser, they don't realize the costs that are involved. A lot of people think it's like the Kelly Blue Book. You look to the Blue Book and we have the green top, whatever size it is, and it's that price, but it's not that at all.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
It ain't a car.

Xiliary Twil:
It is not-

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
It's not a car.

Xiliary Twil:
... a car. You have the year it was done. Is it in good condition? You have all these variables. It takes time and there's databases for certain things. But then if you're doing something for insurance coverage, a lot of times you have to call the gallery. That is a job at a gallery exclusively to answer appraiser questions. It's very complicated. And then you have criteria and standards that you have to follow when you're writing an appraisal report because it's a legal document. I work like an attorney. I work by the hour. It just depends what it is that I'm working on, how long it's going to take.
And I can't pull a number out of the atmosphere, particularly when I'm talking to the client, and they have no record of what they own. I will tell you Marty, there are so many people who did not keep any records. They didn't keep any invoices, they've never had it insured. Then I have to go and figure out, especially if it's not a known artist, who is this artist.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
And this comes down to provenance. That's what you're talking about.

Xiliary Twil:
Exactly.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Can you describe what that is? And why it's needed?

Xiliary Twil:
I always ask people, do you have records of where it came from? So they inherit it from their parents. Do you know where they got it? Did they get it at a gallery in Palm Beach on Worth Avenue? Or did they get it from their parents? The provenance is the history of a work of art. It's the path that the art took to end up at its final destination, which is the owner that I'm appraising the art for.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
And specifically that it is documented. It can't just be hearsay or somebody saying, "Oh, my dad told me that." You have to have the documentation, if it's valuable.

Xiliary Twil:
There is oral history involved-

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Oh!

Xiliary Twil:
... but nothing is better than a clear history. It came from so and so, it ended up in an auction house, than my parents bought it, and then it's been passed down. There is a company that's called Proper Provenance, and it's a young woman, I adore, who has developed a business to research provenances. Because, especially if you're dealing with works that might have issues because they were sold pre and during World War II.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
I was just going to bring that up. The whole issue with the Holocaust and the Nazi stealing the art.

Xiliary Twil:
And a lot of people sold their art for pennies, just so they could get a passport to get to some other country, whether it was Havana or China. The stories are very sad. The good thing is that there are laws in place now, and they don't have a time limit on them. They changed those laws, because now with so much information being shared on the internet and there's a lot of repatriation of artwork, it's not a 100%, some countries do not abide by the laws. A lot of artwork is being repatriated, but not everything. And the interesting thing is, Marty, is that the wealthy families who photographed their houses and they photographed the rooms, their living rooms, their dining rooms, and they photographed it with all the art in it.
And these were in catalogs and in books that the family had made, there black and white photographs. And that has really helped a lot of the scholars go back and say, "This house was photographed in 1935 and there's that van Gogh, there's that Klimpt on the wall. And that show that family owned those works of art. The photography has been a huge asset in making these discoveries.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
That's remarkable. I did not know about that. That's fascinating. What's the toughest part of your job?

Xiliary Twil:
I think the toughest part of my job is researching the values. For the most part, since I've been in the business for 42 years, I've been around a lot of art. Grew up with art. Used to be a director of two galleries. I've worked with a lot of the major artists in the world. But it's valuing it, because you can't just pull it out of the atmosphere. You actually have to do the research. You have to then present the value in a way that is understandable, that's clear, concise, makes sense. And you have to provide comparables to arrive at your value conclusion. And that's not always so easy.
It takes time, because you're actually researching. And then the time that takes to do a report, it's a legal document. And because it's a legal document, you have to be very careful in what it is that you put on paper. Let's say you're doing a divorce, so you come up with a value, but then the opposing person can also go have an appraisal done. So you have two different values. Then if they can't settle, the judge has the right to appoint a third appraiser.
In the Harry Macklowe case, who was big real estate developer in New York, same thing happened. He had a high appraisal, his wife had a low, or vice versa, they weren't even close. And the judge said, "We're not going to do the third one, you have to sell everything," which they did, "and you can split it." It was like $680 million or something. It was a lot of money. And so divorce is a difficult situation.
And then you have your charitable donation, that is really a legal document, that goes to the IRS. So if you are wrong, that report can be audited and you as well as your client can be responsible financially for the difference in value. I just wish that someone could do a big billboard internationally, that these are legal documents and it takes time to craft them, depending on what rabbit hole I go down in trying to get the information. I've had pieces that I've told the client, "These are not by the artists that your family said they were by."

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
That can't be fun.

Xiliary Twil:
I got to break the news that this is not by who they thought it was, and you will never be able to present it as that because it's just not true. We're not authenticators. But when it's so blatant, it's not by that artist.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
And how can you tell that?

Xiliary Twil:
In many cases, I reach out to my colleagues that own galleries, not appraisers, but galleries that worked with that artist, whether living or dead. I show them the artwork and I have in the contract with my client that I have authority to present works to experts. I will have to do that sometimes, just because I don't feel that it's right. The signature is wonky. I'll dig deep trying to find all the signatures of one artist and something signed in blue ball point pen. Well, no, they didn't have that in 1920, I don't think.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Certainly not in 1870 or something like that.

Xiliary Twil:
Yeah, so things like that happen. It's really a lot of work. And I think too, Marty, people don't understand what being credentialed really means as an appraiser.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
I want to talk about that. I have issues within my profession, because you want to work with somebody who's certified in what we do and has accreditation in the industry. That's so important given that you could be valuing something that's worth several million dollars. You're a senior appraiser, accredited senior appraiser with the American Society of Appraisers. Now what kind of hoops do you have to jump through for that?

Xiliary Twil:
You have to go back to school, and you have to take courses that are appraisal study courses, so that's the start. Then you decide that you're going to become accredited, because in our association the top level is accredited. Then you have to actually take an exam. It's like a three hour art history exam.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
It's like a bar exam for appraisers.

Xiliary Twil:
Yeah, exactly. If you pass, and lots of people do not pass, you become accredited like I did.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
This brings me to another very important question. What questions should people be asking an appraiser when they're considering hiring them?

Xiliary Twil:
Are you accredited with American Society of Appraisers? Are you certified with the Appraisers Association of America or the International Society of Appraisers? Those are the three associations. Are you current with what's called USPAP, Uniform Standards of Appraisal Practice? That is something that is required by the IRS for you to have as well as being current with your credentials. Are you knowledgeable in this area that you're going to be appraising?
So if I have a great impressionist art collection, I would say, "How many impressions paintings have you appraised before? Is this your area of expertise?" If they're honest, they would say, "No, I've only appraised furniture." That's not the person you want to be hiring. People really need to investigate, because you're going to get a legal document and if that person doesn't know what they're doing, it's problematic for a lot of different reasons.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Chances are if somebody turns it around overnight, that's a problem, because they really haven't done the homework, because it sounds like appraising is a lot of homework.

Xiliary Twil:
It is. That's why I don't read,

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
For pleasure. Read for pleasure.

Xiliary Twil:
Yeah. She said, "I want you to join a book club." I said, "All I do is write thesises, thesi every day. All I do is I research. I write. I research. I write." That's what you do. You actually have to write term papers every day.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
I would think understanding the history of art is vital to being an art appraiser.

Xiliary Twil:
It is. I ran two galleries. That means I know how to buy, I know how to sell. I still to this day work at art fairs. I work in Art Miami every year. I was just in Chicago for the big art fair working that in Chicago.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
And I just want to point out that they are not the ones on the corner or in the nearby-

Xiliary Twil:
No.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
... park. These are the major art gatherings, conventions, conferences, whatever you want to call it.

Xiliary Twil:
Good point.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
So let's talk about the older generation and the artwork they possess. What if they're aging in place or they're moving to assisted living or one partner is moving to assisted living or someone is passed, how does all that work?

Xiliary Twil:
It can become complicated, Marty. Most people have never inventoried their possessions. I would put that first on the list for anyone is inventory everything. Whether it's artwork, household contents like furniture, appliances.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Grab a camera, grab some video. If you've got kids, make it a project for the whole family. Have them document things in their room.

Xiliary Twil:
Good idea. And you can put it into an Excel spreadsheet or even just type it up on a list.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
And keep it out in the cloud. Because here in California we get fires, we get earthquakes, there are thefts, other places get flooding. You just never know what can happen.

Xiliary Twil:
I agree. If you don't do anything else, do that. Make a list and figure out what it is that you have. One of the things too is anytime you buy something, particularly art, save the receipt, and do a file of that artist. So let's say it's the Salvador Dali, make it a separate file with the invoice that you got. If there is an insurance schedule, put that into this art file. So when the time comes, you have a list that you made, you have files made for each artwork. That's a good starting point. But then you need to call somebody in to figure out what is this worth. You have to figure out what it is that you have before you start giving it away. Because that's what happens when you read those stories that someone bought a Whistler etching in a thrift store for $15, and they sold it for three million.
People get in a rush, get rid of this and this, and things are overlooked. So it does take some time, but it's better when the collector is still alive where you can ask questions. Sometimes people can't, because it's too late. Someone has died, someone has Alzheimer's, they are going to a care unit. When my mother was diagnosed with an aneurysm, she lived with severe migraines her entire life. My father had passed, I have a sister, we went through the entire house and made a list with the line down the middle who got what watch? I got the other watch. Who got the diamond this and diamond that? And we had a list. And my sister and I xeroxed it. We put the original in her safety deposit box. And when my mother passed, we had the list. It was really easy to determine what to do with everything.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
As you were saying earlier, someone you love passes, you're struck down by grief and yet everybody's asking you questions. You have to make major decisions, all in the course of a few weeks, or you're expected to. It's incredibly difficult. The simpler you can make it for those who will survive you, the kinder you are being.

Xiliary Twil:
I've been named art executor in some of my clients wills. So when one spouse or both are gone, they call me in to figure out what to do with the art. I'm working on one of those right now. When the first spouse died, we ultimately auctioned, so the surviving spouse could stay in her house, make sure that she had the money to have care. And she just passed away about a month ago and now we're working on the remaining art, what to do with it? I work with the attorney, the CPA, and the family in a case like that.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
That's fascinating. So I guess in the will they would have to distinguish you as the art executor, and then the person who's the executor of everything else. I had not heard of that before.

Xiliary Twil:
Yeah, it's helpful, especially because I'm familiar with the artwork. I might have sold them the artwork. I might have appraised it over the course of the years. So it makes things a lot easier. Of course, you always get people that think they can do it on their own. But for the most part, if people want to maximize the estate holdings, it's best to call in someone who has experience in art, not figured out on your own.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
That's beautifully put. Xiliary, I have learned so much during this discussion, so thank you very much for joining me.

Xiliary Twil:
It's been a pleasure as always, Marty. Thank you for inviting me today.

Marty Stevens-Heebner:
Thank you so much for listening to How to Move Your Mom (and Still be on Speaking Terms Afterward.) Please visit howtomoveyourmom.com for more information about this episode and for additional podcast episodes featuring other extraordinary guests and conversations. Until next time, this is your very grateful host, Marty Stevens-Heebner.