caregiver

A New Set Design for Nursing Homes

This is a fascinating innovation in the physical design of a nursing home. Forget the clinical model of mini-hospitals and consider bringing the outside inside with a neighborhood look and feel. How comforting to have a front porch with your…

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Geriatric Depression Scale

Despite how older adults are depicted in the popular media, depression is not a natural part of aging. As important, with proper recognition and treatment depression can be reversible. That’s the good news. The bad news is that left left…

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The Ceremony of the Shoes

Embedded in the living towards the end lies a narrative about love under fatal duress. It is a space that refines courage and fosters an unexpected elegance. Frannie Lindsay’s poem below is about how this elegance, born of love and…

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The Dementia Game Is About You

This intriguing game based on navigation and memory skills is part of a massive study on dementia. The study’s goal is to create a baseline for the “normal” decline of navigation and memory skills with aging to serve as a…

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The Heart of Caregiver’s Resilience

Caregiver’s resilience is a mind set that guides action, an oath to meet failure and keep going, to rise above the unfairness of it all. The last stanza of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “A Psalm of Life” is an anthem…

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The Secrets of Aging Parents

Adult children are frustrated by their aging parent’s unwillingness to share important information about their plans, health or finances. The withholding weakens the caregiving partnership and sets everyone up for poor outcomes. So why are they so secretive at the…

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The Rise Of Dilemmas

The landscape of old age is populated with dilemmas, which represent a new and confusing layer of complexity. Here’s why. We are all raised to be accomplished problem solvers. It is a skill set that focuses on the elimination of…

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What We Live For…

There are many ways to dance with an aging parent who has dementia. Toni Luciani invited his 91 year old mother to join him using photography and the canvas of her aging to create art. The photographic results in the…

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Failing In Place

New arrivals to our caregiver support group confirm what’s being reported in the medical literature. Dementia in the land of aging parents has reached a tipping point and now become the overwhelming concern of 80-90% of our attendees. The vast…

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Amazon Review

5 out of 5 stars By JOHN MORRIS CANTILLON on July 12, 2016 Format: Paperback|Verified Purchase John’s wife reviewing here- I work in an assisted living community, and this is one of the best books I’ve seen for adult children…

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