In 2025, three elderly nuns made headlines by escaping their care home in Austria and returning to their old convent, with the support of local townspeople. They have since appealed to the Pope for permission to continue living at home and the Pope may be the final decisionmaker. This story highlights an important aspect of aging: the need to seek help and adapt our living situations as we grow older. Check out the original article here.
For those in Georgia, ensuring the ability to live safely at home as you age involves several considerations. If safety becomes a concern, family, friends, or Adult Protective Services can petition the probate court for the appointment of a guardian. And guardians can decide where the ward (that’s the elderly person) gets to live.
A probate judge must decide whether the ward lacks the capacity to make responsible decisions regarding their health and safety before appointing a guardian.
In order to make that decision, the probate court looks at a ward’s decisions to determine whether their home environment is safe.
Factors the court considers include:
Activities of Daily Living or ADLs. ADLs are divided into two categories: Basic and Instrumental or Incidental ADLs. An easy way remember the difference between Basic and Incidental ADLs is that Incidental ADLs do not require someone to touch you in order to help you. Someone can go grocery shopping, check your financial accounts, pay your bills, call your doctors without touching you. These are all incidental ADLs.
Basic ADLs require you to touch the person or potentially touch the person. Basic ADLs spell the word DEATH(S). D – Dressing, E – Eating, A – Ambulating, T – Transferring, H – Hygiene, and S – Standby Assistance. Standby assistance is recognized by the VA but not Georgia Medicaid as a basic ADL.
We don’t know why the nuns were sent to a care home. Based on the article it appears that their superior may have simply ordered them to transition to a care home. Here in Georgia, you can live at home so long as you can remain safe in your home.
To avoid being removed from your home, you must take action and get the help you need when you need it. This means that when you begin to have issues with balance and vertigo, you switch to slip-on shoes, add hold bars to the bathroom and toilet areas and handrails to the hallway and hire the neighbor to help collect your mail for you. You can also hire a professional caregiver to assess your home or begin with the National Institute on Aging Home Safety Checklist by clicking here.
Hire the caregivers you need to be safe and healthy at home and a probate judge will have a much harder time finding the evidence to justify the appointment of a guardian.
Now sometimes guardians are necessary as in cases involving dementia and sometimes a move is needed. But more people could live at home if they took the simple step of setting aside their pride and stubbornness and practicing a little common sense to start. Living at home can be the most expensive option. This is where an elder care law firm can help a person (even as early as age 55) stretch their savings, explore tools such as long-term care insurance, and asset protection to maximize the benefits available and minimize the cost.
Seek guidance from law firms specializing in planning. This can help ensure that living at home remains a viable and safe option, protecting your savings and maximizing available benefits.
The nuns, now receiving round-the-clock care and support from their community and aim to demonstrate to the Pope and church authorities that they can live safely in their convent. How might they have prevented their transition to a care home in the beginning? What can you do today that could save you from wanting to escape later? Talk to an elder care attorney like Michelle Wilson early and be proactive. Escape isn’t the plan. Aging at Home is.
