Happy New Year! It is now 2024, and it promises to be a tumultuous year in our country, as well as the world, as presidential politics, two international wars, criminal trials, inflation, rising costs, and the specter of long term care fill the headlines.
As 2023 came to an end, we lost some of our country’s most notable and influential non-elected leaders. Former Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger passed away at the age of 100, still relatively healthy and presumably active. In May of 2023, he celebrated his 100th birthday and in interviews around his birthday, Kissinger said that many world leaders—including Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin—would most likely answer his call were he to telephone them unscheduled. Most recently, Dr. Kissinger focused his attention on the implications of artificial intelligence. He was a frequent guest with media and on panel discussions, writing, and traveling abroad. A remarkable life lived to the fullest until the end.
The same cannot be said for retired Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor who also passed away in December at age 93, suffering from advanced dementia.
Justice O’Connor broke the glass ceiling for a great many women. She was the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States, elevated to the Court by Ronald Reagan in 1981. Her early years were often referred to as the O’Connor Court because she cast the pivotal vote on several cases. This was only two years before I began my own law school experience, and the cases that we read during that time had long lasting impact for decades.
O’Connor was an amazing person in so many ways. She graduated from high school at age 16, went to Stanford University and was only 19 when she started law school as one of just five women in the class. Former chief justice William Rehnquist was a classmate and they briefly dated.
O’Connor graduated near the top of her class but was rejected for most law firm jobs. A Los Angeles-based firm offered a job as a legal secretary, but she declined and eventually found work in the San Mateo County, California, county attorney’s office where she initially began working for free.
What a lot of people do not know or remember is that Justice O’Connor left her lifetime appointment on the bench in 2006 after serving twenty-five years because of the health of her husband. In 2005, O’Connor’s husband was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and when the ailing Chief Justice William Rehnquist told her that he was putting off his retirement, O’Connor decided that, with her husband’s health declining, she could not wait and risk the possibility that the court would have two vacancies at once.
As it turned out, that’s what happened anyway. O’Connor announced her retirement, and the chief justice died weeks later. She stayed on for another six months while confirmation hearings proceeded, and in a cruel twist of fate, her husband’s health took such a precipitous downward turn that he had to be placed in a facility where he eventually died. We do not know if they had a long term care insurance policy, nor do we know the true havoc his illness caused financially or emotionally.
As we have observed on countless occasions, O’Connor’s retirement was the last step in a long balancing act between family and career. We often talk about the impact that the need for long term care in the home has on unpaid family caregivers. Aside from the physical, emotional, and mental toll, there is of course the professional impact. The caregivers often have to miss hours at work to accommodate doctors’ appointments for their loved ones, as well as other demands on their time. Quite often they lose out on promotions or may even suffer the indignity of losing their careers.
Sandra Day O’Connor gave up lifetime tenure on the Supreme Court—a job she loved and one with extraordinary power—to care for her husband of 52 years as he deteriorated from dementia.
That decision, in 2005, began a poignant final chapter of her extraordinary life. Her choice, at age 75, reflected her attempt to integrate the often-conflicting demands of professional achievement and family expectations in a country still adapting to changing gender roles and an aging population.
Justice O’Connor had hoped to care for her husband at their home in Arizona. But when that soon became untenable, she moved him to an assisted living facility. He was unhappy about the move, but then something remarkable happened: He found romance with another woman who was a patient there.
And Justice O’Connor, who not long before had been the most powerful woman in the country, was thrilled because he was content and comfortable again—even like “a teenager in love,” as their son Scott put it. The justice kept up her regular visits, beaming next to the happy couple as they held hands on a porch swing.
John O’Connor died in 2009, at age 79. In 2018, Justice O’Connor announced she was formally stepping back from public life because she, too, had dementia, most likely Alzheimer’s.
Then 88, she shared the news in an open letter to “friends and fellow Americans,” urging them to put “country and the common good above party and self-interest.” She wrote that she would continue living in Phoenix, where John had been, “surrounded by dear friends and family.”
“While the final chapter of my life with dementia may be trying, nothing has diminished my gratitude and deep appreciation for the countless blessings in my life,” she wrote. She hoped that she had inspired young people toward civic engagement, “and helped pave the pathway for women who may have faced obstacles pursuing their careers.”
Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve on the court, died of complications related to advanced dementia, probably Alzheimer’s, and a respiratory illness, the court announced. She was 93 years old. We can only imagine what her last years were like for her, her family, and those who cared for her.
We continue to live longer and age as a Society. It is nonsensical to believe that we are going to escape this world without needing some form of assistance. The COVID-19 pandemic drove up the cost of care like we have not seen in several years. The very idea that we can afford to self-fund this critical need is more nonsensical than ever before. It is incumbent upon all of us, regardless of the relationship we enjoy with our clients, to be educating and making them aware of this great risk we all face.
To this end, every January, we escape the cold and snow and head to my “happy place” in Cabo San Lucas. I go with the intention that I am going to work out daily, read voraciously while soaking up the rays, eat exceptionally well on a diet high in seafood, see some sights like the original Hotel California in Todos Santos, about an hour away, and talk to people in one of the two infinity pools about long term care insurance. What? Yes, I go on holiday fully prepared and mindful that I am going to advocate for the importance of long term care insurance. To this day my children take exception to this last point, but, when they were in the LTCI business with me they always welcomed the referrals generated–essentially policies waiting to be written—which I always returned from my holiday and shared with them.
How were these “sales” made in the pool or around the firepit after dinner? Very simply, I opened my mouth. When fellow vacationers would ask me the proverbial “What do you do for a living?” I remain very quick to say that I help people avoid disaster in the latter years of their lives. This always prompts the desired follow-up question of how I do this, and we talk about the growing need for long term care in our aging society. By asking about their own family experiences (which are becoming more and more frequent), it is becoming easier and easier to transition from identifying need to personalizing it and projecting their own potential future needs for these services, and to talk about the financial, physical, and emotional toll a lack of preparedness will have on their families.
Clearly, I am not afraid to talk about long term care insurance or Medicaid Compliant Annuities. Just as important, I have reached a point in my career where I am simply an advocate for these critically needed products. The industry has been very kind to me and my family, and I can honestly say that I do not care if these people ever purchase long term care insurance, but their failure to do so will not be because they did not hear about it from me. It has been very liberating to achieve this status, and to truly be able to dance like no one is watching. I have no fear or embarrassment or reticence in talking about what we do in an effort to help people protect themselves against this deadly age and health related tsunami that lurks offshore.
My New Year’s resolution for this year remains the same as it has been for any number of years now: To raise awareness and to educate people on this need in their lives, and to help them protect themselves while they have the requisite health and financial options available to them. I hope you will make this a resolution of your own. Whether you are an insurance professional, financial advisor, or attorney, we all share in this grave responsibility. P.S. The costs associated with these “marketing events’’ conducted in the pool are fully deductible according to the Internal Revenue Service.
