What 20 Years of Elder Law Has Taught Me About Families — and What I Wish Every Family Knew Before the Crisis

My Nonna Lidia was not just my grandmother.

She was there from the beginning, in the most literal sense. I was born in Italy, and when my family came to the United States, Nonna and my grandfather, Nonno Mimmo, came with us. We all lived together under the same roof. And when my father left, when I was three years old, Nonna became something more than a grandmother. She became the constant. She walked me to school every morning and picked me up every afternoon. She was the one who said yes when my mother said no. She was the one who loved me with a completeness that asked for nothing in return.

My grandfather showed his love through discipline and accountability. He had strong beliefs about how a granddaughter should conduct herself, and he held those standards with a firmness that was sometimes hard to live up to as a teenager in suburban New Jersey in the 1990s. But Nonna was the softness alongside that structure. Her love was unconditional in a way that I understood even as a child, even when I could not have articulated what unconditional meant.

I tell you all of this because when her dementia came, it did not just affect a family member. It reached into the foundation of who I was and began taking it apart piece by piece.

I was her caregiver. I was also the one who made the hard decisions. Not just about medications and appointments, though there were many of those. About placements and transfers and whether she should make a trip back to Italy to see her brothers and sisters one last time, when she was already fragile and declining. I pushed for that trip. I was probably the most vocal family advocate for it. And when she did not do well on the flight, when I held my breath over the Atlantic and watched and prayed, I started accumulating a kind of guilt that would take me years to understand.

There were other things that added to the pile. A piece of Medicaid paperwork that I had delegated to the rehabilitation facility and failed to follow up on myself. A bill that came afterward that none of us could afford to pay. The account going to collections. Me, the COO of an elder law firm, someone who built follow-up into the culture of our team as a professional value, sitting with the knowledge that I had failed to follow up on something that mattered for the person I loved most.

And then there was the afternoon at the hospital, when the EMTs brought Nonna in against my explicit instructions. I was her Power of Attorney. I had told them not to transport her. By the time I arrived, she was already there, frightened, alone in that environment she hated. And I was not the version of myself I wanted to be in that moment.

I tell you these things because they are true. And because every family that walks through our doors is carrying some version of them.

When She Was Gone

After my Nonna died, I went to a dark place.

I kept moving. I went back to work. I kept my calendar full. From the outside, I was doing all the things a resilient person does. Inside, things were different. I was crying in private. I had stopped eating well enough that my mother came to my house to make sure I was eating at all. I lay awake turning over decisions I had made, examining them from every angle, finding myself guilty in the verdict every time.

At a peer group of businesswomen I belonged to, something finally broke through. In the middle of a meeting, in front of a room full of accomplished, high-powered women, I broke down completely. This was not something my grandfather would have approved of. It was not the face I presented to the world. But I could not hold it anymore. And what happened surprised me: those women did not judge me. They recognized what they were seeing. Some of them had lived their own version of it. One of them gave me the name of someone she had found helpful during a difficult time of her own.

That moment, and the time of reflection that followed it, began to shift things. Slowly. Not in a straight line. One step forward, two steps back. But gradually I started to understand that the loss of my Nonna, and the darkness that had come after it, was not something that had happened to me. It was something that was happening in me, changing me, clearing out room for something I had not yet found.

What I eventually found was my purpose. The realization that all the lessons Nonna had modeled for me since I was a small girl, the ones about family and love and showing up and keeping people together, had not been lost with her. They were in me. And I had to take them out into the world.

I became a Certified Dementia Practitioner because I needed to understand what had happened to her, and to me, and to our family. And I built, alongside my business partner Eric Goldberg, the kind of elder law practice we started in his kitchen: one that was built around families, not just around cases. One that remembered that behind every piece of legal planning is a person, and behind that person is a family that loves them.

That is the firm we have tried to build. That is what the work of two decades has shaped in me.

What 20 Years Has Actually Taught Me

I am not going to fill the rest of this post with legal tips. We have other pieces for that. This is something different: what I have learned about families by walking alongside them through the hardest seasons of their lives.

Planning is not about death. It is about love.

The most persistent reason families do not plan is that planning feels like anticipating the end of someone's life. I understand that instinct. It is deeply human. But a Durable Power of Attorney and a Healthcare Proxy are not about death. They are about what happens during life, at the moment when life becomes most difficult to navigate.

When a stroke happens, or a fall, or a diagnosis, the family members who are trying to help discover the difference between wanting to help and having legal authority to help. They cannot access the bank account to pay the mortgage. They cannot consent to a procedure. They cannot apply for Medicaid. Without the right legal documents in place, they face a court proceeding to establish that authority, at exactly the moment when time and money are in the shortest supply.

The Power of Attorney is an act of love. It is saying to the people who love you: I have made it possible for you to help me. That is a profound gift.

The document that matters most is not the will.

In all my years of this work, the document whose absence causes the most immediate damage is the Durable Power of Attorney. Not the will. The will speaks to what happens after someone dies. The Power of Attorney speaks to what happens during life, and life is where every crisis arrives.

I have watched families spend more money on guardianship proceedings than the entire cost of the estate planning that would have prevented those proceedings. I have watched people navigate the courthouse while simultaneously navigating the hospital. These are people who loved each other and wanted to do the right thing. They simply did not get to the paperwork in time.

Families do not fight about money. They fight about feeling.

Estate disputes look, from the outside, like they are about assets. They almost never really are. They are about whether the relationship was acknowledged. Whether the caregiving was recognized. Whether the parent understood what that adult child sacrificed.

The daughter who cared for her mother for five years and received the same share as siblings who visited twice a year is not, at her core, angry about the money. She is grieving that her five years did not register. She is carrying the question that haunts so many caregiving children: Did it count?

A well-drafted estate plan, one that names intentions clearly and explains the reasoning behind decisions, prevents most of these conflicts before they start. Not by changing the numbers. By making the love visible in the document itself. I tell every client to write a letter. Not a legal document. A personal letter that says who you are, what you built, and what you hope the people you leave behind will carry forward. It has no legal force. It may have more power than anything else in the file.

The families who navigate this best have one thing in common.

After two decades, I have seen this pattern clearly enough to say it with certainty. The families who come through the hardest seasons with the least lasting damage, financially and relationally, share one characteristic: someone was brave enough to start the conversation before the crisis arrived.

Not to complete all the planning. Not to have everything signed and filed. Just to start. To say, to a parent or a spouse: we need to talk about what would happen if something changed. To schedule a consultation. To move toward the difficulty instead of away from it.

That single act of courage, often by an adult child who had to push past every instinct to avoid the topic, changes everything that follows.

What I Understand Now That I Did Not Understand Then

When I was in the middle of caring for my Nonna, and in the dark months after she died, I kept looking for what I had missed. All the things I should have known, should have done, should have handled differently.

What I eventually came to understand is that I did the best I could with what I had at the time. That is what every caregiver does. And the guilt, the particular guilt that caregiving produces, is not proof of failure. It is proof of love. The people who love deeply are the ones who carry the most. That is simply how it works.

What I know now is that the families who have the most peace are not necessarily the ones who made perfect decisions. They are the ones who had a plan that gave them a framework for the decisions they had to make. And they had people walking alongside them.

That is what we try to be at NJELC. Not just a law firm that produces documents. People who walk alongside families through the most difficult seasons of their lives. That commitment came directly from my Nonna, from everything I experienced and learned and ultimately found on the other side of losing her.

Everything I was looking for was there all along. I just had to go through the hardest years of my life to be able to see it.

The One Thing I Want You to Do After Reading This

Have one conversation this month. With your parent, your spouse, your sibling, whoever needs to be part of it. Not a comprehensive planning session. Not a legal appointment. Just the beginning.

Ask what they would want if they could not make their own decisions. Ask what matters most to them about how things are handled when the time comes. Listen more than you speak.

And if you need help starting that conversation, or if the conversation has already happened and you are ready for the legal piece, that is exactly what we are here for.

It is a privilege to do this work. I am grateful, every day, for the families who trust us with their hardest moments. I take that trust seriously. And I hope that something here has made it a little easier to take the first step.

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When your family is ready, whether that means a conversation or a consultation, we are here for both. Schedule a Consultation.

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