Caregiver Support

From Pleading To Informing…


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A lead caregiver of aging parents was going to extraordinary lengths to keep everything together only to find herself drowning in transactional quicksand. As her parents drifted into the land of “more and more care,” her uninvolved siblings either refused…

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Dangling Conversations…


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Conversations with adult children about their aging parents eventually include the dilemma of declining health. Embedded in this emotional topic is the volatile issue of “advanced directives.” Everyone knows that you need one, but having just one version turns out…

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The Right Words…


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We are always searching for the right words when a death occurs. We mean well but our attempts to comfort may painfully produce the opposite result. This blog post by Carole Brody is a “refresher course” in how our words…

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Bad Parent Connection: Now What?


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It’s one thing to have a decent connection to our aging parents. We may not be close, but we still feel compelled by love and loyalty to come along side them in the in last years of their lives. But…

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The Wrong Signals: Shutting Down Change Before It Starts


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How do we help our aging parents consider making positive changes in their lives? We want to help, and feel we have good ideas that could improve their quality of life. For example, we would like for them to consider:…

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Navigating Caregiver Dilemmas


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As the drama of aging parents unfolds, it reveals itself as layers of interconnected dilemmas that resist heroic attempts to keep everything together. Like an unruly Rubik’s Cube, alignment in one caregiver area seems to trigger chaos in another. Just…

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I Don’t Need Assisted Living!


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An older adult is ready to move into an independent living community and undergoes a “pre-placement” health assessment by the facility’s physician. Based on the findings, the physician indicates that the older adult “needs assisted living.” The older adult and…

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Conflicting Layers of Longevity


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As boomers approach the outskirts of being old, a new aging dilemma is beginning to emerge: simultaneous developmental phases with their aging parents. It is one thing to be fifty-something and have aging parents in their mid to late seventies.…

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The Transitional Care Dilemma: Good News


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Sooner or later aging parents get swept into the complex currents of transitional healthcare. It may be a simple back and forth between the primary care provider and one or more specialist, or it could be a major health setback…

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