Conversations Near the End Mind Map
This is the companion mind map for the article Conversations at the End…
Conversations at the End…
We wish it didn’t come to this, but it does. Someone you care about is at the end of their life. No one knows exactly when but everyone is clear about what’s happening. Now comes the hard part, the conversations…
Dearest Son, Dearest Daughter…
I wrote How To Say It To Seniors for adult children of aging parents as well as professionals who work with older adults. In retrospect, that was short sighted. What I failed to appreciate was that older adults were deeply…
Best Possible Day
Atul Gwande’s article “Best Possible Day” is compassionate and articulate about asking the right questions, over and over again, in a world where time is running short…
Best Possible Day…
Caregiver Support Lessons…
Last fall, I started a caregiver’s support group. The goal was to offer a non-judgmental setting for adult children to share their stories. While being the facilitator, my real job was arranging chairs and making sure everyone had a turn…
Dancing with Negative Feedback: Redirection and Resolution
I wrote this article for an assisted living magazine but the technique of “Redirection and Resolution” works in a wide range of situations where negative feedback needs to be managed in a calm, professional manner.
Asking the daughter of a…
Communicating with Older Adults: An Update
I have been studying how to unlock the communication code of older adults for the last twenty-three years. My first breakthrough came early on with developmental psychology, a model based on age-specific tasks that are easy to understand, easy to…
Navigating Caregiver Dilemmas
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…