How we write Since Mom Died

Who publishes it

Since Mom Died is published by OwnersFirm, a St. Louis company that builds reference sites for families in this metro. The desk is written for one reader: a daughter, often in her fifties, whose mother has died and whose father now lives alone in a house his wife ran. The chapters carry a desk byline instead of a person's name, because nobody on the desk is a clinician and we do not want a byline to suggest one.

How a chapter gets written

Each chapter starts from a question a daughter actually types late at night, such as whether Dad is eating enough or how long grief lasts for a man his age. We answer it from public pages only: the National Institute on Aging and other federal agencies, the State of Missouri, the Area Agency on Aging that covers the county, and a small number of national nonprofits. A person opens each page, reads it, and confirms the sentence we lean on is really there. The link sits on the fact itself, and the sources page lists every page with the date it was checked.

Where a source gives a number or a year, we repeat it as printed. Where it does not, we do not invent one. Where a page would not open for us on the day of writing, we leave it out rather than cite it from memory. That is why a few things you might expect, like Social Security's survivor steps, are not quoted here yet: the official pages refused our request, so we sent you to people who can answer instead.

What this desk will not do

• No diagnosis. We will not tell you whether your father is grieving, depressed, or something else. We quote what the NIA describes, and we route the question to his doctor.
• No medicine advice. Doses, timing and interactions belong to his doctor and his pharmacist. We say so every time a chapter comes near a pill box.
• No prices. We do not publish hourly rates for home care or anything else we cannot source, including for the company that pays us.
• No invented families. The daughter in Ballwin and the father in Glencoe are the shape of the problem, not people we interviewed. No testimonials, reviews or star ratings appear anywhere.
• No photographs passed off as ours. Pictures on the site are licensed stock photography or photographs supplied by New Plan Care Solutions, and those carry a credit line. None of them shows a family we are writing about.
• No rankings. We do not score facilities, senior centers, funeral homes or companies, and we do not criticize any of them.

The paid placement, in plain words

One company pays to appear on this site: New Plan Care Solutions, a non-medical in-home care company owned and run in St. Louis. It is a client of OwnersFirm, our publisher, and the two are separate businesses with separate owners. Its featured box on the front page, the short boxes after each chapter and the one form on the site are all labeled as paid. The form sends what you type to New Plan Care Solutions and nobody else, and its phone field is optional.

The placement does not buy a chapter, a sentence or a local help listing. New Plan Care Solutions' own website is never cited as a source for a fact. If a chapter says a companion a few hours a week can help, that is because the public sources say so, not because an advertiser offers it.

Corrections

Public pages move and numbers change. When we learn that a linked page no longer says what a sentence claims, we fix the sentence, update the checked date on the sources page, and leave the rest of the chapter alone. If you spot something out of date, the fastest route is the publisher, OwnersFirm. Tell us which page, which sentence and what the source says now.

What to read next

If you arrived here first, go to start here for the reading order, or to the local help directory for the numbers we checked. The about page tells the longer story of why the desk exists.