In this deeply moving episode, Ann Marie-Murrell shares her powerful journey from a glamorous life in Hollywood to becoming the full-time caregiver for her aging parents. Faced with the challenges of Alzheimer’s, family loss, and the failures of the healthcare system during COVID-19, Ann Marie turned to faith, prayer, and purpose. Her new book, Walking Each Other Home: A Caregiver's Journey of Grace, is a raw and inspiring account of love, sacrifice, and redemption. Whether you're caring for elderly parents or preparing for your own future, this episode offers heartfelt wisdom, practical advice, and a message of hope for anyone navigating the end-of-life journey with loved ones.
In this deeply moving episode, Ann Marie-Murrell shares her powerful journey from a glamorous life in Hollywood to becoming the full-time caregiver for her aging parents. Faced with the challenges of Alzheimer’s, family loss, and the failures of the healthcare system during COVID-19, Ann Marie turned to faith, prayer, and purpose. Her new book, Walking Each Other Home: A Caregiver's Journey of Grace, is a raw and inspiring account of love, sacrifice, and redemption. Whether you're caring for elderly parents or preparing for your own future, this episode offers heartfelt wisdom, practical advice, and a message of hope for anyone navigating the end-of-life journey with loved ones.
X/Twitter: @politichickAM | @jennybethm
Website: https://www.annmariemurrell.com/
Ann-Marie Murrell (00:00):
The thing that saved me, the thing that still saves me is prayer, is I was never completely alone and I did have Jesus with me the entire time. That's what saved me. That's what's encouraged me to write this book, to get everything out there.
Narrator (00:19):
Keeping our republic is on the line, and it requires Patriots with great passion, dedication, and eternal vigilance to preserve our freedoms. Jenny Beth Martin is the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. She's an author, a filmmaker, and one of time magazine's most influential people in the world. But the title she is most proud of is Mom To Her Boy, girl Twins. She has been at the forefront fighting to protect America's core principles for more than a decade. Welcome to the Jenny Beth Show.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:51):
We are joined by a very special friend of mine who I've known for well over a decade. She used to have a political video show, and she is from Hollywood, and I got to know her through her political activism coming out of Hollywood recently. She's been through a lot of trials and tribulations, but she has triumphed over those and found the joy and the blessings in things that we all wind up having to face. She's written a book about it and we're going to be talking about that book. The book is called Walking Each Other Home, and it is a book about her journey and her sister Lisa's journey as they helped their parents go through the final stages of life and as the parents had Alzheimer's. So we're going to talk a bit about this. It's a little bit different than what we normally talk about, but I saw that she had a new book.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:51):
I knew about many of Annemarie's issues because I saw things that were happening on Facebook, and I've recently read the book. I think you're just really going to learn a lot. It's a little bit different than our normal political discussion, but it's something that we all should be thinking about whether we are facing this in our own lives because our parents are still alive or because we are parents and we need to be thinking of what we can do to prepare and make that period and phase of our life a bit easier on our own children. So today we are joined by Annemarie Mural. Annemarie, thank you so much for joining me today.
Ann-Marie Murrell (02:28):
It's so good to see you, even if it's not actually real life. I'm so happy to see your face and to talk to you. Thank you.
Jenny Beth Martin (02:36):
I'm just so glad to be with you. So before we go into the book, could you give people a little bit of your professional background before you wound up going back home to Texas?
Ann-Marie Murrell (02:48):
Yeah, I was living in, I moved to California when I was 20 to be an actress. I had a little tiny, my friend and publicist, Tamara keeps saying I'm an actress and a journalist. I'm not either one. I'm neither of those. I had a little tiny career. It was a lot of fun as an actress. It was fun in my political years, that's when I knew you. That's when I first met you. We worked together in DC and on red carpets. It was a big, incredible life. It was a very glamorous life. I had the big house on the hill in California. I had cars and everything. You can imagine everything anyone wants, stuff wise I had and I had great friends in high places. I mingled with stars and politicians, but then when Jesus told me to come home to Texas, I dropped everything and I went home and it was the first time in my life that I can say I put God and family first. I always put myself first and probably 15 other things before him, and it changed my life going home and doing the right thing and honoring the fifth commandment,
Jenny Beth Martin (04:06):
Which is to honor your father and mother.
Ann-Marie Murrell (04:08):
Yes. Yeah.
Jenny Beth Martin (04:12):
So you went home and what was the situation like when you got home?
Ann-Marie Murrell (04:18):
Well, home to Texas you mean?
Jenny Beth Martin (04:21):
Yes,
Ann-Marie Murrell (04:21):
Yes. Okay. Yeah. Originally I went home. I went home every year, maybe every year since age 20 to visit them at Christmas time. And this Christmas my dad had a heart attack, and so took him to the hospital, which was almost an hour away. They lived way, way out in the country. And it was there that the doctor said, how long has your father had dementia? None of us knew. I had no idea. So first my dad was diagnosed. I got them, moved out of their house, put them into an independent living facility, and I was kind of like, okay, good. I've done my job. I'm going to go back home to California. But then my mother was diagnosed soon after she was at the grocery store. I was visiting dad right before I was leaving. I was literally going to fly out the next day and the store called and said that my mother was trying to buy groceries with her social security card. So I knew then that I had to make a choice. I got on my knees that night and prayed and asked for a literal sign. I needed real answers, and I was given a dream that when I woke up, I knew what I had to do and I dropped every single thing. I gave up every single thing, and in doing so, I gained tenfold in my life. Everything changed for the better.
Jenny Beth Martin (05:52):
And we'll talk about some of how it changed for the better, but let's hold off and talk about that in a few minutes. One of the things that I found very fascinating about this book, which is called Walking Each Other Home, it's available on Amazon. It is not a difficult read. It's an easy read except that it's a hard read because it makes you think about your own life and your own relationship with your parents and with your children and things that you need to be doing yourself to get your own house in order. And that's what I found really fascinating about the book because on the one hand, it's sort of a how-to guide for what we all should be doing in our own life and how to help care for our parents if we need to help care for them. And then on the other hand, it's your personal experience and it's like reading your journal while you went through this incredibly difficult time in your life.
Ann-Marie Murrell (06:55):
And it was my journal. I took every word from the journals that I was writing and also a lot of Facebook posts because caregiving can be very solitary. It's really easy to just get wrapped up in your own head. And so I was kind of venting on Facebook and on social media, and that's what ended up being the book, kind of my absolute exact experiences kind of moment by moment. I had to edit a lot of it out because I think I had 500 pages originally and it had to be whittled away. But the main theme that I am hoping for, and it was chapter one in the book, is get your house in order long before the funeral. And that includes me, it includes you, it includes kind of anyone that we're not promised another moment we could die tomorrow. That's just a fact.
Ann-Marie Murrell (07:48):
We're not told when we're going to go. It may not be when we're elderly or when we're just hoping to just retire and then melt into our retirement life. This is about getting your house in order right now, if anything happened to me right this moment, I have a very organized shed with very few personal boxes. I've got pictures that are labeled on the back, right on the back of your pictures. My parents had thousands and thousands of just photographs that I had to throw away because if they didn't have names on the back, you have to look at something and you have to say, is the next generation going to know who this is? Or care if not, it had to go in the trash. And I had to do that for both my parents and make the decisions for them, which is heartbreaking for a child to have to throw away something.
Ann-Marie Murrell (08:41):
I would look at something and then I knew what it was. If it was a broken piece of something and I would think, oh, this was when we went to Disney World as a family and it was so much fun, but I had to think if my son found this in my box, would he know what it is? And almost every time the answer was no. And I threw it away. Don't make your children do that for you. Don't put them through that because if it's too late, they're going to already be exhausted and sad and mourning and grieving. Don't make them grieve every time they have to do something else for you after the fact. Try to do it yourself. Now today,
Jenny Beth Martin (09:24):
Annemarie, that's such very good advice. Both of my children now, they're 22 years old, so they're not little kids anymore.
Jenny Beth Martin (09:35):
And my son is six five. He's so tall. And my daughter recently was married. So I've been going through and cleaning out my own house and thinking, okay, are these things that I need anymore? Do I not need them? And trying to just declutter and downsize a little bit. And one of the projects, so I've done a lot of decluttering, but now I've got this project where I'm going through and working through all the old photos, especially photos from before I have my iPhone, and getting those scanned and making sure that they're dated and that when they load into my iPhone library that the date is adjusted so it shows them what the date was so it's more meaningful to them. It takes a lot of time to do that, but if it's important enough to me to keep, then I think that it has to be important enough that if something happens to me, my kids know what to do and I'm not adding a lot more to them. I still have a long way to go, but as I was reading the book, I was like, oh, I, I'm beginning to do this. But it's hard to do. It's not something fun because you're thinking about your own mortality, but you're also thinking, I want to give a gift to my children so they don't have to work through this hard work that has to be done.
Ann-Marie Murrell (11:02):
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Make sure you write your own name. If it's a picture of you, write your name too. Because right now, off the top of my head, I can't remember my great grandparents' names and that's terrible. We're all usually one generation away from not knowing the generations before us. We know our grandparents' names, but usually not their parents. And it's really important. So remember, your grandchildren need to see your name on the back of your pictures too, from junior high and elementary, because they're not going to know what you look like maybe as a child. Yeah. So you're on. And also make photo books because photo books are a lot easier. So many times I've gone to mom and I love to go to estate sales, and we would go together and photo albums full of pictures are just, they don't sell and they get thrown away. Don't assume that your great-grandchildren or your grandchildren are going to want these giant photo albums full of pictures who they don't know who anyone is. So photo books are another option.
Jenny Beth Martin (12:10):
And the good thing about photo books, they're so easy to do now with the technology that's available that you can date it, you can write who was in it and what happened, and even put some of your own thoughts from the event. So it winds up being not just your own memories, but it can be a historical document for your future generations.
Ann-Marie Murrell (12:29):
Absolutely. Yeah. And I even took pictures, some of those things that I threw away that were broken into little pieces. I also took pictures of those before. I threw a lot of it away just so I could make a note for my sister and me. But yeah, you can do that too, but let it go. No stuff is important enough. I had to give up so much just stuff, the house and the big stuff, and also little stuff. It's just stuff focus on now and your family and experiences. That's the best we can do with our lives.
Jenny Beth Martin (13:06):
I think that's really important advice. And then you also had to make sure that you had power of attorney for your parents and worked through the legal documents that we all hear about, but oftentimes we delay taking care
Ann-Marie Murrell (13:22):
Of, oh yeah, this is embarrassing, and I've already said it publicly. I might as well just out myself completely, but I didn't even know how to use an ATM card. I was that dependent on someone else taking care of my finances and life in California, and that's horrible. That's horrifying. I ended up in the end taking care of my parents, my dad's VA account, they had two or three different bank accounts. I think three. I ended up with two bank accounts, so I had to learn really fast. But yeah, you need power of attorney over finance and medical. You need, if it's not you, and well, I highly recommend whoever is there caregiving in the same state. Try to keep it there because sometimes I see families that, well, the brother in Minnesota has power of attorney over medical. You need it when you're there too. And finance, a lot of people are afraid of the finances, but get an elder attorney to help you through it. That's another thing that helped me tremendously, an elder attorney. But yeah, get your documents, and I have my documents in order now too for my kids. You don't need to wait until you're in your eighties for someone else to do that. Assign it now.
Ann-Marie Murrell (14:45):
I don't know. I was diagnosed this last year with mild cognizant disorder is early onset and also COPD. So as soon as I got those, I realized, oh, I've got to do everything I wrote about in my book for myself. But also I kind of rushed to get it published while I'm still able to talk to you. And it kind of expressed myself. So yeah, that was another reason I did this.
Jenny Beth Martin (15:16):
Well, I hate that, that you have those diagnoses, but I also think that what you've gone through is going to wind up being a blessing for other people because of the book and what you're trying to encourage people to do in the book and the things that people will learn in it. It's more than just about the photos and the decluttering and the legal. You also really talk about what it's like to become a caregiver. Those things are urgent and pressing because you were in this situation where you had to move your parents very quickly into at first the independent living facility, and then there were additional moves, but that was, talk a bit about those moves and about your experience becoming the caregiver, which is truly providing care and love and compassion to your parents.
Ann-Marie Murrell (16:16):
Yeah, I think it was seven moves altogether that I did within just a couple of years because originally I put them into independent living so that mom could take care of them, and then I had to move them to assisted living. My plan was to keep them together forever. I wanted them to be able to stay. I mean, they were married 53 years. My sister and I both wanted them to stay together and then go from assisted to memory care. When that time came, unfortunately, my father's disease progressed really in a terrible direction. He became violent. He had to go to a psychiatric hospital for two weeks because if you're violent, it doesn't matter how old you are, what the reason you can't be, you have to detox or whatever it is to get you stabilized, to be able to live safely with other people.
Ann-Marie Murrell (17:08):
I had to move my mother in with me. And at the time I was living in an apartment, she moved in with me and dad. I found a memory care for him. So that was another move, well, two different moves because mom had to move with me. Dad was there first in the psychiatric hospital, then a lockdown facility. That's where everything went really south for me. And that's where chapters eight through 11 are really hard to read. They were hard to write. It was hard. I edited, I don't even know how many times I edited right before publishing, which is why it was late getting out there. But dad was in there during lockdown, COVID, lockdown, and it was brutal. It was absolutely brutal. I couldn't be two places physically at the same time, and mentally it was so hard. And my mother was going through so much on her own after what she'd been through with dad. And then he was just kind of left to his own devices. Hospice was supposed to be there helping. During lockdown though, when I couldn't visit him anymore, he died very quickly and wasn't, I don't believe it was Alzheimer's or dementia, like the death certificate said he was skeletal.
Ann-Marie Murrell (18:32):
His top and bottom false teeth were gone. He couldn't eat anymore. He couldn't feed himself. No one was feeding him. No one was helping him to the bathroom. His room was disgusting. It was horrifying. I think to this day, Lisa and I both probably have PTSD from that time period. So it was brutal. It was horrible. I wish I could do it again. I wish I could relive that part and fix things, but I still don't know how I could have. But yeah, those are the mistakes I made.
Jenny Beth Martin (19:04):
Those mistakes that happened from the lockdown facility, I don't know as I read it, I don't know how the government failed us on so many levels at the beginning of COVID, they strive so hard to protect everyone without evaluating the risk of whether somebody is at high risk for COVID or not. And I understand they didn't know a lot about it in the very beginning, but even in that 15 days to slow the curve, well, those 15 days are what did it for your dad. It didn't take long at all. If you scare everyone in America so badly that they're afraid to go to work and you scare them and employees of nursing homes so badly that they're afraid to go to work, to care for people in a nursing home, what happened to your dad is almost inevitable because the staff probably wasn't even showing up.
Ann-Marie Murrell (19:59):
Oh, yeah. Well, and that's supposedly what happened. And you figure if there's sweet Ms. Johnson in room 1 0 2 and crazy, Mr. Brown who is fighting everyone and trying to get into people's rooms and can't feed himself and needs a lot more care, which one are you going to take care of if no one's watching? And that's what happened. And hospice would call, they were very vigilant about calling me and telling at two in the morning to say, oh, we found your dad slumped over in the hallway. He's got cuts and bruises. And they were calling me every day about that. But I wasn't following up by asking, send me pictures, please. How's his room? Is he eating? Is someone helping him? What needs to happen? And they always just said, everything's fine. That's Mr. Brown being Mr. Brown. And I wasn't following up with the right questions. I was too afraid to know.
Ann-Marie Murrell (20:59):
I think I was too afraid to see. And until the very end when my sister and I were snuck in so that we could see him die the first night, he didn't die though. And that's when we saw his room was trashed, completely trashed. It smelled so bad that both of us had to leave every once in a while so we wouldn't throw up. It was horrible. And then he didn't die that night, and then the next night he did die and his room was scrubbed clean, smelled like ammonia. We could still see blood stains on the carpet. It was horrifying and horrible and so sad. But the only blessing I can hope for with my dad is that he just didn't know the difference anyway, and that would be what I have prayed for since then.
Jenny Beth Martin (21:52):
I think that that is a good silver lining to look for in the situation. Before he went to the lockdown facility, he was in assisted living. And it seems like based on the description in the book, that it was a very nice facility, not a cheap facility. And yet without constant vigilance from you in, even with constant vigilance from you, you wound up learning he was being overmedicated. Some of the medications that they were supposed to be administering for him, they were not handling properly. What are some of the lessons you learned from that period?
Ann-Marie Murrell (22:34):
Kind of the same thing. You need to visit twice a day, three times a day. You need to stay there. You need to watch the staff. No matter how good they appear. It's kind of when you're not looking, that's when things happen. And so you just really have to be there all the time. One of my dear friends has managed nursing homes her whole life, and she said the worst thing that can happen is when people treat a nursing home like an animal shelter and just drop off their family member, come back and visit on holidays and just trust that strangers are taking care of them. And she told me, she said, even our best nurses have bad days sometimes, and things happen and family, if family isn't there to follow up, it's easy for a hard case person, especially to fall through the cracks and just vigilance constant. And yeah, while they were in assisted living, I was there all the time. I was there every single day. I was as vigilant as I possibly could have been, but then there was when I wasn't there nighttime, and it's hard. And during lockdown, especially when I couldn't be there at all, that's when you just can't trust God and qualify everyone else.
Jenny Beth Martin (24:02):
I think that that makes sense. And also when they're dealing with dementia in the mornings, normally they're a little, oftentimes they're better. And then in the afternoon and evenings and nighttime, they face more problems probably because their body in their mind is just so much more tired. I would imagine. I'm not a doctor, but you also had to go get sleep. So those nighttime hours were really tough for you, your mom and your dad.
Ann-Marie Murrell (24:33):
Oh yeah. Sundowning is what they call it. And that's when in the evening, yeah, you're absolutely right. Their brains just won't shut off. And that's when kind of things go crazy. That was when we thought for a while that her disease was progressing faster when they were in assisted living, because dad, when I would come to visit, he was sleeping in his chair, but mom was all wound up and just talking about how crazy dad was. But then it turned out that we didn't know she wasn't sleeping at all and who knows what was happening in the evening, but because of her disease, she couldn't explain it. She couldn't remember what had happened, but she just knew something had happened when after dad died and I was taking care of mom, even while I was there in my house with hospice coming and nurses, I watched them like a hawk. Every single medication, every change, any tests that they gave, I was able to make up for what I couldn't do for dad. And when she was sundowning, that was brutal. I had a baby monitor by my bed and I was just up sometimes 48, 72 hours in a row because once you wake up, it's hard to go back to sleep. But yeah, even being at home, you still have to be vigilant. You just can't trust and assume that anyone else can take care of your loved one the way you can.
Jenny Beth Martin (26:10):
I think that that's exactly right. When I was reading about, and as you just mentioned, the baby monitor, my parents are still alive, and I'm very thankful that I still am able to spend very good quality time with them. When my mom's mother, my maternal grandmother died. She died from breast cancer that metastasized. It was a terrible experience for her. And she was in hospice at my parents' house, and I was the oldest of four children at this point. I was married and in my twenties. And so what my then husband and I would do is on the weekend for six, or it may have been as much as eight weeks. It may have only been six weeks. I'm a little fuzzy on that. But every weekend on Friday afternoon after work, we would drive over to my parents' house, and then we took the baby monitor and put it in the room with us.
Jenny Beth Martin (27:09):
And I was up every night going and helping take care of her on the weekend so that my mom and dad could get some rest. And I don't think I appreciated just how important that rest was for them until I gave birth to twins and was awake and not getting any sleep at all. And they came and provided that same kind of relief for me so I could get a little bit of sleep. But when you're in the middle of a situation like that, it is helpful to have somebody else who can help out. But what you were dealing with because of the dementia, if you brought other people into the mix, especially with your mom from when she began sundowning, those other people wound up agitating her and would've made your life even more difficult. So you were just caught between a rock and a hard place.
Ann-Marie Murrell (28:01):
Yeah, the last half year was really difficult. And my sister, she lived with us. Lisa lived with us, but she worked eight hours a day in a very high stress job. So when she came home, she needed some grace and it was really, really, really difficult. I have a group of friends we call ourselves the honeybees that I've had since junior high school, but even they, mom was their favorite teacher. Mom loved these girls, but even then, they couldn't come over either because she didn't understand and it did agitate her. So for about the last half year, I became very quiet. I became isolated. I didn't talk on the phone. I didn't text very much because it was kind of like if you don't have anything good to say ever, if everything is always bad news, you don't want to burden your family or friends with that.
Ann-Marie Murrell (29:00):
So it became a very quiet, small world for me. And I'm going to tell you, Jenny Beth, it's been how long my mom died in 2022. It's 20, 25 now. I still have groceries delivered to the house. Sometimes it's still kind of hard for me to push myself out there all these years later. It really, really does something. There's a reason why in prison they put you in solitary confinement and it just messes with your mind and it tamps you down a lot. The thing that saved me, the thing that still saves me is prayer is I was completely alone and I did have Jesus with me the entire time. That's what saved me. That's what's encouraged me to write this book, to get everything out there. Even though I'm not comfortable doing this anymore at all, it's still I've made, I've pushed myself to do what I need to do to try to, if anybody can be helped, then yay.
Jenny Beth Martin (30:10):
It's so good that you're doing this. And when you prayed in the book, one of the things that I thought was over and over, you talked about the prayers that you would have on any given day or any situation, and you were not asking God to come in with some magic wand and change the situation. You were asking God to give you what you needed to be able to handle what was before you and to be present with you. And those are the kinds of prayers that I think are in situations like this the most important because nowhere in the Bible does it say Our entire life is going to be easy if we just believe in God. But what is promised is that God will be with us and will provide comfort and peace that is unlike any other peace that we can have. So as you're describing that Jesus was with you and you felt his presence, that's what I'm thinking of. You were just surrounded by his peace.
Ann-Marie Murrell (31:13):
Oh, absolutely. I was never maternal. Mom was not a maternal woman when I was growing up, so I wasn't a great mom. I wasn't a great anything. I wasn't a great mother. I wasn't a great daughter. I wasn't a great friend. I wasn't a great anything growing up and throughout my entire life. But when I came here and was given the second chance at life, at redemption, I think this book is a great story of redemption. Now I feel like every single thing that I lacked, I have now, I have a bigger capacity to love and care for people. I have a lot more patience than you could ever imagine. My grandson was born three months before mom died, and I am such a good grandmother. I've got two now, and I've just been given this whole new, every pain, every struggle that I had before was fixed, was gone.
Ann-Marie Murrell (32:18):
I was lonely my whole life. My biological father died right before I was five. He was my hero. And mom married Jean Brown, my stepdad, who was a wonderful stepdad, but she married less than a year later, and I was never allowed to even speak about my father again. And that caused a lot of problems for me growing up. Almost immediately after I said that prayer and had that dream when I moved to Texas, that was healed. I could look at my pictures of him and think he was wonderful, but God is my father and all of it was healed because of him. So yeah, I'm so close to my children. My son and daughter-in-law, they live with me now. My grandkids live with me For anything I lost, I am found. I was the prodigal daughter that went away, and I was allowed to come back and given that blessing, that gift, to care for these people who loved me and who I loved for the first time in my life. So it was time.
Jenny Beth Martin (33:25):
It sounds wonderful. And with your son and your grandchildren with you now, that is a very, very special, special gift for you. Going back for a moment to when your father died, it was in the middle of COVID, and it wasn't even in the middle of COVID. It was in the beginning of COVID because COVID lasted way too long. But it was in the beginning of that, and you were thankfully in a seat where you were allowed to have a funeral, unlike some states where they would not even allow it. One of the things that I thought about the funeral that was very touching is that you did have a military salute to him and also a former congressman. Louis Gilmer showed up and Louis spoke, and it sounds like Louis is a good friend of your family's.
Ann-Marie Murrell (34:20):
Oh, I talked to him yesterday for almost an hour, mainly because I'm having a book signing it. It's this wonderful place called Bear Creek Smokehouse, and it was originally scheduled for July 12th, and I had to move it to August 2nd. I forgot to tell him. So he went to my book signing and I wasn't there. So I was on the phone with him for over an hour yesterday. He has been the most incredible, wonderful friend to my family. He would visit my parents starting when they were in independent living. He brought them food, he visited them at assisted living. He came to the house when mom moved in with me and played basketball with her. She forgot the 43 years she taught high school. She only remembered that she taught, she was a coach her first year of school in the fifties. And so I put up a basketball court for her, and yeah, he came up.
Ann-Marie Murrell (35:14):
He's just been wonder. He spoke at my dad's funeral. It was graveside and my friends were scattered all over the grave, the cemetery holding flags. It was very, very moving and wonderful and beautiful. Louis spoke at my dad's funeral and they came to my mom's funeral and he actually came to the house after and brought food and was serving food to this house full of people. And yeah, Congressman Louis Gomer is wonderful. He's a handful of politicians. I told him this yesterday. I maybe trust five that I've known. I don't even know if it's five that I've personally known, and he is one of them. He was the real deal.
Jenny Beth Martin (35:58):
He absolutely is. And I'm with you. He's one of the handful, very small handful of politicians who I trust. And Anne-Marie, it's important for people to realize that a lot of what you were just describing of the actions that Louis was taking to go visit your parents while they were in the independent care, bringing food, showing up at the funeral, he was still a member of Congress then, but he didn't feel like he was so important that he couldn't show that Christian compassion and just every common compassion to a family in need.
Ann-Marie Murrell (36:35):
Absolutely. Yeah. And no other politician showed up for me during that time. So yeah, I don't think of him as a, I don't even like to say the word politician anymore. That's a dirty word for me. It's just a good person, a good human being who really loves America and cared so deeply and was a little bamboozled when he ended up leaving. And that's a shame. That was such a shame for everyone and left.
Jenny Beth Martin (37:06):
It truly was. When I read the second part of your book as you were describing what it was like caregiving to your mom in this very final stage of her life as she was living with you, you had another move and you and your sister and mom moved in together into a house and your experience in your life with your mom, it is something everyone should read because I think that a lot of people going through such a difficult time would see this time as a complete burden. And instead of doing that, you accepted the situation and made the most of it. And the story that you shared about the rocks that your mom collected and how, I don't want to give it all away. I want to make sure people go read the book. You should read because read about the rocks. It's such a small thing, but it just showed that you were able to have this other kind of relationship with your mom. You wound up being the caregiver and more of the elder in the relationship, but you shared joy with her and shared the beauty of life, and you rediscover things that are everyday things that we often take advantage of as we get older. We see it when we're young, like the beauty of a bluebird, but we forget about it in our day-to-day life. And yet when she was getting older, she saw those things again.
Ann-Marie Murrell (38:42):
Yeah. Yeah. Jenny Beth, thank you for reading the book. You really did. I did. You did. Yeah. I wanted the last years for my mom, however many years she was going to have. I wanted them to be so special and so beautiful and so full as long as I could. There's one chapter, one sub chapter I think called my Benjamin Button mother. She was, for a while, she was my toddler mom, and that was when she was sundowning and she was throwing the tantrums and things like that. But I love toddlers. My grandson, Charlie, is a toddler, and it's so fun and it's fun to experience things with people who see things through childlike eyes. And that's the way she was in the final days. Then she was an infant at the very end. I was changing her diaper. She couldn't really talk anymore. She couldn't read anymore.
Ann-Marie Murrell (39:44):
She couldn't understand colors and things. I mean strange things that you just assume, how can somebody forget? She loved guacamole. She used to fight us for if we went to a Mexican restaurant, she would have a giant bowl and wouldn't share it was hers. And one day I brought it and I was like, oh, I got it from your favorite Mexican restaurant. And she had no idea what it was, and she tasted it and she was like, this is terrible. What are you trying to do to me? And I'm like, how do you forget that kind of stuff. But yeah, I just mostly just felt so it was such a gift because I'd been gone my whole life. I couldn't wait to leave high school. As soon as I graduated, I moved early to college. As soon as I could leave college, I moved to California just to get as far away from everything as I could.
Ann-Marie Murrell (40:36):
And so to just be able to have this life change, everybody should, should be able to feel this. And it was wonderful. I've had so many friends too are like, oh, I loved your house. That house was incredible in California, and it was the most beautiful house I ever saw. Gina just said that on her show, Dr. Gina Loudon, and she was there all the time. Everybody was at that house, but it was just a house. It was so unimportant. And I mean now I'm in the middle of nowhere in this little tiny town in east Texas, but oh, I have so much more than I ever had there so much more.
Jenny Beth Martin (41:23):
I think that what you have done with this book, if you're my age or your age and your parents still alive and you're looking at the prospect of having to take care of them, I think that this book changes that perspective and changes it from, I may have to take care of my parents to, I may have the opportunity to do this for them. And it really you experiencing things that I know that you never imagined 10 years ago that you would be experiencing, and it's a terrible, difficult experience. And yet also you found, found the pleasure in it. And I think a lot of people would worry about moving their parent in with them. But when you read what you went through in these assisted care and nursing home type facilities, hands down, you want your parents to move in with you. You don't want them in a facility like that and all the money. And even if you're in a facility that costs $10,000 a month, you still have to show up if you don't show up. No telling what happens to these parents who gave birth to you and loved you and gave everything in sacrifice for you. So you had the opportunity you had in your life.
Ann-Marie Murrell (42:51):
And I think saying $10,000 a month, pretty much that's what it is. And when you think a lot of people think, I'm paying that much money, so these people should be taking such good care of my family member, it's just not the case. The place that dad was in was brand new. It was a beautiful place. It was the prettiest, most modern, beautiful place you could imagine, and you would think that would be safe. It's really it. They don't pay nursing staff people that much money. They're not getting the best and sometimes the worst. I wish this is another I regret, but I mean there was another nursing home in town that had very high ratings, but it looked a little shabby, but there's a waiting list for that place. That's where I wish I could have put my father, but at the time, this was the only place that would accept him. And now I know why. It's because it was empty. There weren't many people there and the staff was terrible. So yeah, vigilance.
Jenny Beth Martin (44:08):
Yeah, I mean, it's easy to look back and you wind up with perfect hindsight, but at the time you were just doing the best that you could. But I think that's why this book is so important because if you read it now, if you're listening to this and your parents are still alive, go buy this book and read it and start thinking about and having those tough conversations with your parents so that you're thinking about the kind of care that you're going to help them have at the end of their life. And what you said at the beginning, Emory, we do die. Everyone does wind up dying, and it's important to talk about that and to think those kind of decisions through before you're thrust into the middle of the unimaginable and having to just make the very best decision that you can in the midst of extraordinarily, extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
Ann-Marie Murrell (45:09):
Yeah, absolutely. Have those. It's hard. Nobody wants to talk about a subject that's sad or that, oh, it's not. People don't want to think about the fact that they could die. My dad died when I was five, and nobody wants to think that direction. It's hard enough to stay alive. It's hard enough to stay happy in your day, but yeah, don't wait till a crisis. Just get your house in order now. Then it's done. It'll be finished. And parents don't assume that your kids are going to get along in the end. I've seen so many families break up siblings that are fighting over this stuff, and it's because the parents didn't set it up the way it needed to be. They assumed that their kids would all get along and not have any disagreements. Well, usually the main caregiver who's there in the thick of it, that's another person that usually gets beat up in the end.
Ann-Marie Murrell (46:09):
And when the other siblings aren't there and weren't in the thick of it and they don't know, Lisa and I got along so well. Our styles are very different. We didn't fight over any of the stuff, but then again, I set it up. I said, you decide what you want, Lisa, and I'll decide. And we never clashed. Do it now. Let your kids go through your house. Let them put their names on the bottom of your stuff and trust them. If they say they don't want a collection of 500 cookie jars, please believe them. Start selling off your cookie jars. Now, mom had not 500, but she had so many cookie jars, Lisa and I, how many cookie jars does a regular person need? Maybe two. So the rest of them had to be, that was another heartbreaking thing, having to donate or sell mom's cookie jars. And like you said, she loved rocks. I can't tell you how many rocks she had by the funeral. We were giving rocks. I had a big giant bucket of rocks at the funeral and saying, please take them please. I mean, so yeah, just get your house in order now today, siblings talk about this. Talk about what your grandparents too. It's not just, and it's your children talk right now out in the open. Don't be afraid.
Jenny Beth Martin (47:35):
I think that is such very good advice. And my siblings and parents and I have been having some of those discussions about my parents and the good thing and the difficult thing. My dad is a retired United Methodist minister, and so my family, we've been to a lot of funerals and we've talked about the end of life oftentimes. So some of it isn't for us, it is not fun. I don't enjoy those conversations, but at least it's something that we've done so often in my family that they're conversations we can continue to have to make sure we're refining them and having read this book and like, oh, I've got to go back and have additional conversations with them based on what you were describing because it's things I haven't yet thought of. And just recently I went through because now my kids are gone and took the time to open up all of my boxes of Christmas decorations and divided them up into things that I wanted to still have, and then dividing them between my two kids, just sort of part of that downsizing process that I mentioned. But I just think it's important. And besides they should enjoy it while they're alive and young and building their own lives. If I want them to cherish a memory, I want them to be able to have it now to continue cherishing it. It's hard to let go of things, but also it's just things, the relationships are the most important.
Ann-Marie Murrell (49:13):
Oh yeah, a hundred percent. I have so many Christmas decorations in my shed. That's mostly what's in my shed. But right now, I need everything in there is very necessary because I've got grandkids and I make a big to-do out of Christmas stuff. They already know. I've told them, if you don't want it, that's one thing just, but I don't have the heart right now to get rid of any Christmas stuff. But yeah, absolutely, just let it go. Some of the people that I had to leave behind in my life too were so obsessed with the things and where they needed to be in their lives. And that's a sad thing for me that I still mourn sometimes some of the people that I had to leave behind. But you've got to have priority God and family. If people, anything other than that is you've got too much stuff, you have too many burdens, it's not important. Let it go and let them go if they're not on board.
Jenny Beth Martin (50:27):
And it is hard to do that, but in the moment it's hard to do that. And then when you just get a little bit removed from it, other things happen that like the relationship you had with your mom at the end of her life, it's something you would never trade for all the money in the world. And it's invaluable. There's no way you could even put a dollar amount on
Ann-Marie Murrell (50:53):
It. No, not at all. No. Every single moment was beautiful and wonderful. When you get past chapters eight through 11, the rest of the book, it's really a happy ending story. It really is. Even with my own diagnosis, my ending is still very, very happy. My health is just garbage. But I'm very happy. I've traveled. I've decided I went to Italy, I've been to Greece now. I'm doing things that I never would've done before. And I'm going to live as wonderfully as I can and as graciously and thankfully as I can and however much time I have left, I want my kids to know that there are no regrets and they're very happy for me and they're in a different place. We all are now. So yeah,
Jenny Beth Martin (51:55):
That is very, very good. And then as we wrap it up, this book, you started out talking about it, and I'd like to end just let you have the last word on this. It is about caregiving and it's also a how to manual and then it is inspirational from a Christian standpoint. And just how did your relationship with God and Christ change throughout this process, and what was the best part of that?
Ann-Marie Murrell (52:30):
Oh, the strength and the peace that I was given is remarkable. I can't even describe when I first changed. It was exactly like Ebenezer screw waking up on Christmas morning. Every single day since then has been like that for me, the first thing I do is thank God that my eyes are open and that I get to put my foot on the ground and I get to have another day and I get to share his light as much as I possibly can. I can make sure that this world and I learned I couldn't change the world politically. That really wasn't my gift. But what I'm able to do in this world, in the world that I live in is going to be as wonderful because of Jesus changing me and lifting me up above every single thing and above pain and above sorrow and suffering.
Ann-Marie Murrell (53:33):
I'm glad the book is done because that was painful. But I think in that I did it and it's out there and I really hope it will help people. If not learning from the tips and tricks, learn from my mistakes and don't do those. And thank you Jenny Beth for having me on today too. I really appreciate it. And also the book, there's another title. It's also Walking each Other Home. This is Walking Each Other Home, A Caregiver's Journey of Grace. I never would've used that title if I'd known there was another one out there and I researched. And anyway, yeah, that was a little frustrating. So
Jenny Beth Martin (54:17):
It is just a lovely book. Was not sure. I was afraid it was going to be a very difficult read, but it wasn't you. I am so thankful that you wrote this book. I'm so thankful that you came on the show today to talk about it. And I hate that you had to go through such difficult experiences, and I am thankful that you made the most of it and are setting an example for others to make the most of those difficult situations. Thank you so much, Anne Marie for being on with me today.
Ann-Marie Murrell (54:52):
Oh, of course. Thank you. And I love what you do. Thank you. Thank you.
Narrator (54:57):
The Jenny Beth Show is hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, produced by Kevin Mohan and directed by Luke Livingston. The Jenny Beth Show is a production of Tea Party Patriots action. For more information, visit tea party patriots.org.
Jenny Beth Martin (55:17):
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