Aging, caregiving and the journey through the second half of life

The Caregiver Dance: Compassion and Equanimity

April 1, 2012

Last year I went to a conference on accepting the limits of being a caregiver. It was attended by mostly hospital-based healthcare professionals who have to deal with suffering and loss on a daily basis. The focus of the program…

Reframing the Retirement Conversation

March 25, 2012

What if they held a retirement planning meeting for financial advisors themselves and no one showed up? Sound odd? It was, but that’s what happened. We set up a meeting for a group of financial advisors to discuss their own…

Where Do I Start? Coaching Aging Parents

December 27, 2011

Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind. Dr. Seuss For the last twenty years, my work has involved helping adult children find a new rapport with…

Bad Parent Connection: Now What?

December 19, 2011

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…

The First Cousin

December 11, 2011

I grew up amid a herd of cousins, surrogate brothers and sisters who were embedded in my childhood. Operating as life scouts, they lived a few years ahead of me on the dangerous and uncharted perimeter of the adult world.…

Boomers Arriving at 65: The Stability Survey™

October 4, 2011

We neither get better or worse as we get older, but more like ourselves…Robert Anthony The boomers are landing on the shore of old age at a rate of 12,000 a day. While turning 65 is officially classified as “young-old,”…

The Wrong Signals: Shutting Down Change Before It Starts

July 30, 2011

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:…

Seeking Forgiveness: Linda Kriger

July 4, 2011

This deeply moving article by Linda Kriger was published in 2008: http://www.forward.com/articles/14255/ I have read and reread this tale of estrangement, bitterness, regret, and the search for “repair” because I heard endless versions of it from friends, colleagues, clients, and…

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…

Navigating Caregiver Dilemmas

May 25, 2011

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…

Second-Half of Life Blog