Who publishes this

Since Mom Died is published by OwnersFirm, a St. Louis area publisher that builds reference sites for local businesses and their customers. This site is one of them. It is written for the adult daughter of a widowed father in the west St. Louis County towns and the city, at the moment she realizes that her mother ran the household and her father cannot, and it is written to help her, not to sell to her.

Nobody who writes here is a clinician. There is no doctor, nurse, pharmacist, social worker or counselor on this site, and it carries no named human byline for exactly that reason. Its pages are written and checked by a small editorial desk, and every factual claim on them links to a public source, almost all of them the National Institute on Aging, other federal agencies, the State of Missouri, or the region's Area Agency on Aging. The sources page lists every one with the date it was checked.

What is paid for, and what is not

One thing on this site is paid for. New Plan Care, an independently owned non-medical in-home care company based in Chesterfield, Missouri, is a client of OwnersFirm, and it pays for the featured placement that appears on the front page and at the foot of the chapters. That placement is labelled every time it appears, it sits in its own box outside the articles, and it is not a rank, a score or a result of anything on this site, because nothing on this site ranks anyone. The two companies are not commonly owned. New Plan Care does not publish an hourly rate, and neither do we; questions about rates and hours go to it directly at (314) 405-0887.

The lead form on the front page goes to New Plan Care and nowhere else. It asks for a name, a phone number and a town. It does not ask about anyone's health, and it must never be extended to. The articles were not paid for, and no company reviewed them before they were published.

The rules we write under

• We never describe any company as licensed, certified, accredited, clinical or medical. Missouri's health department says it issues no license for the private duty or private pay type of company, and we say so where it matters.
• We never give medical advice, never interpret a symptom, and never suggest a dose. Every chapter that touches a clinical edge has a section that sends the question to the care team or the doctor.
• We never print a price or a price range.
• We never make a negative or comparative claim about a hospital, a hospice, a facility or a competitor.
• We never invent a statistic, a quote, a review, a testimonial or a family. There are no composite daughters and no named patients here. The father in these pages is yours.
• We quote sources in their own numbers and their own years, with a link on the fact itself.
• We run no analytics tags, no pixels and no third-party trackers. A server-side count of page views is the only measurement.

Who this is for, and who it is not

It is for the daughter, and for the son and the daughter-in-law and the granddaughter who has stepped into the same role. It is written in second person because that is who is reading at two in the morning. It is not written for clinicians, and it is not a substitute for one. If your father is in danger tonight, the number is 988 for a crisis and 911 for an emergency, and neither of those is a website.

Corrections

If a source on this site has moved, changed its figure, or been misquoted, we want to know and we will fix it. The sources page shows the date each link was last checked, so you can see how fresh a claim is before you rely on it.