Aging Alone Archives - Aging, caregiving and the journey through the second half of life

Social Fabric Mind Map: Preserving Vital Social Connections of Aging Parents

June 30, 2019

“Here’s a good resource: David Solie’s Social Fabric Mind Maps, from his book entitled: Caregiver Mind Maps: New Tools for Eldercare. After completing one of these Social Fabric Mind Maps you can suggest and provide more recreational activities, social outreach,…

Sorting Out Aging Parent’s Situations and Issues: Start With A Graphic Overview of “All The Moving Parts”

August 20, 2018

In our work with older adults and their families, we find that a graphic overview (aka mind map)of the “moving parts” of their situation or issue helps everyone better understand its context as well as possible steps that could be…

If I Die First…

May 10, 2018

Aging parents face an uneven future in which one will be left behind. FD Reeves’ poem “Home in Wartime” contains two elegant and inspiring stanzas of instructions for both possibilities… From “Home in Wartime” By FD Reeves If I die…

Death Is Not The Biggest Problem

March 26, 2017

In her article Silicon Valley Would Rather Cure Death Than Make Life Worth Living Emily Dreyfuss takes technology’s oligarchs to task over their collective crusade to “cure death.” Not that curing death is a bad thing, but as Dreyfuss points…

End Of The Line…

March 24, 2016

We take pains to keep the nursing home at arm’s length, a cultural purgatory that haunts our worst fears about being old. Yet, as Valery Hazanov found out, it is also an instructional landscape about who we are despite our…

Should Older Adults Live With Their Peers?

October 6, 2015

Environmental gerontologist and social geographer Stephen M Golant, University of Florida has written a brilliant article on where older adults are living now and why they may opt to live with their cohort in the future: “My focus is on…

The impact of unforgiveness on older adults

September 8, 2015

Families are a battle ground where the wounds of conflict can be carried for a life time. While at some point forgiveness seems in order, its withholding is an all too common theme in the exhausting contest to prove who’s…

New Boomer Epidemic: Aging Alone

May 30, 2015

Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods. …Aristotle As the age wave arrives at the land of old, it carries with it a substantial population of childless and unmarried Boomers characterized as “elder…

So what’s in the world come over you…

June 22, 2012

The title of this blog is taken from John Prine’s song “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness,” which seems apropos for an article on the profound impact of loneliness on the health of aging parents. Here’s the first punch line:…

Aging In The Wrong Place

June 14, 2011

As the boomers pass en masse through middle age, it is assumed that they will undergo “generativity,” a term coined by the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson in 1950 to denote “a concern for establishing and guiding the next generation.” Generativity represents…