Inside Aging Parent Care

Ebooks for Caregivers of Alzheimer’s Patients

By Carol September 27th, 2011

Reviewing Hope for Helpers and More Help for Helpers by Michael Byrd

Bill recently posted his response to Pat Robertson’s remarks on Alzheimer’s disease and caregiving. Bill and many others have expressed another side of the caregiving experience in the wake of Robertson’s suggestion that a man should divorce his wife in advanced stages of the disease. No one denies that caring for someone with dementia is a tough road, but caregivers know that the journey can bring us more than just pain and sacrifice.

Chaplain Michael Byrd has written two timely ebooks for caregivers who want to keep on caregiving and save their sanity. Michael draws on his more than fifteen years experience working with elders and their caregivers to create these helpful companion electronic resources.

While he brings his generous spirituality to …

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Revisiting the Crocodile: A Caregiver Sums Up

By Carol July 12th, 2011

You never know how a death is going to take you until it happens. Even so, I think it is normal to try to prepare by looking ahead–especially during a long good-bye like my father’s.

We can find so much information on grief and mourning that researching the subject almost gets in the way. After my mother’s death I had a particularly hard time getting past what I’d learned I “should” feel to what I actually was feeling. In the early days after Dad died, I felt stunned. Encountering Death and losing Dad left me disoriented and at loose ends.

I needed structure and some way to understand my life now, post caregiving and orphaned. Three weeks after Dad died, I had this helpful dream: I walk down a hill to the edge of …

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Dad’s Independence Day Redux

By Carol July 3rd, 2011

Here it is–another 4th of July and Dad has been gone more than one full year. We had our quiet remembrance of his passing on Friday. I decided to re-post a piece from last year because it still says it best.

Dad didn’t quite make it to the Fourth of July, but “independence” was his rallying cry. Maintaining his independence was his first concern when he moved to Denver two years ago. Assisted living enabled him to secure the level of independence that he craved. He had his own apartment there, and that became home to him. He made the choice to engage hospice care only when he was assured that he could preserve his independence by remaining in his home.

In the final week of his 91years my father was still …

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Deep Inside Aging Parent Care One Year Later

By Carol June 28th, 2011

We were both blessed and cursed with the chance to travel with my father Frank down the long road toward the land of death. We went as far as we could with him. Then we turned back to make the return trip without him. We were changed and our lives were changed by the experience of his dying and by losing him.

In just a very few days it will be the first anniversary of Dad’s death. Last year at this time, the hospice nurses thought he had another two weeks or more remaining to him. On what turned out to be the last day of Dad’s life, Bill and I consulted with the hospice chaplain. I was trying to prepare myself for our last days together and to find the words to say …

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My Mother’s Hands–A Poem

By Judi June 26th, 2011

My mother’s hands

One day I was slicing tomatoes with my mother’s hands. Gone were my small ones and in their place her wider ones wrinkled knuckles veins like raised relief mountains on an antique globe. I thought I would miss the idleness of my former pair known to sleep in and outsource the vacuuming. But when I touched my cheeks with her cool smooth palms I left them there for a long time understanding that I was now the one he will seek out to feel safe.

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Revisiting the Crocodile: A Caregiver Sums Up

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Deep Inside Aging Parent Care One Year Later

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