My Mother, Your Mother

Anatomy of an Illness

You Can Heal Your Life

Pi-Yi Mayo

About Miller Trust

*Intro and outro music are from an original piece by

Carl Zukroff of The Blue Hotel

Eric Keye’s

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Hello, you have stumbled on to another episode of Get Your FILL. Financial Independence and Long Life, where we explore ways to achieve both of those goals.

The music that’s playing now is from today’s guest, Eric Keyes. The song is called: Everyone Knows My Drinking, No One Knows My Thirst. And I was gonna say that that sums up Eric’s approach to life, but actually there is no real way to sum up Eric. He is a true Renaissance man.

You hopefully met Eric last week when he told me how to cook eggs, which turns out to be all in the shopping. But in addition to being a musician and an excellent cook, Eric has many other talents which will hopefully be revealed today. There is a link to Eric’s music and his website and other stuff for him on my website, GetYourFILLPodcast.com.

Eric, thanks so much for joining us today. But I wanted you to share – When we talked the other day you were talking about caring for your parents. And that’s something that a lot of us are either are dealing with or are gonna be dealing with soon. And I just wanted to kind of, I know a lot of people struggle with the decision: Should we try to care for them are we gonna try to kill ourselves and others if we do this, or should we put them somewhere where theoretically they’re gonna get “professional care”? How did you decide what to do?

E: Well, it’s a combination of both. When I was a child, my mother, I’m adopted, and my mother worked at the daycare that I was at, so she found a way to be hands-on and make a little money. I had a really frugal mother and my best friend, Jim Taylor, was adopted across the street. His mom, Charlene, did the same thing. They both worked at La Petite, it’s like a little kids’ day care center that we were at.

So when my mom was at work, and we weren’t in school we were over there, but she worked there in the morning and the afternoon and so that kinda taught me a little bit about that there’s a different way than just drop your kids off.

You know, my mom actually found a way to combine the two, ’cause she was hands-on, she wanted to see that I was okay, but she also wanted to make a buck so she could figure out how to do both, right?

C: Well, but also wanted… She probably wanted you to socialize with other kids.

E: Right, right and she knew that I needed to learn how to compete exactly what, we were always in right from the get-go, were in gymnastics and swimming all that stuff. So to answer your question, when my parents started to become… There was a real point where I just saw. I’ll tell you the story, it’s a powerful story. It tears me up. At first, my mother and father were still lucid, they were living in their home in Houston. And my mom was starting to have a real hard time seeing with her glaucoma and so they had given her two different eye drops, and then there was some type of pill she was taking. I don’t remember exactly what it was for but it was related to it and my mother was always so lucid and always so good with budgeting and writing things down, stuff like that. And so she asked me, she said, “Hey Eric, I don’t know how many of these pills I’m supposed to take a day and when I’m supposed to use these eye drops and I said, “Okay well, let me look on there and I read the directions, I read all the – I even went as far as to read, you know, what the risk were, the side effects and stuff. I was real careful about it, everything seemed pretty benign, so I took a big mark