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By Carol November 15th, 2011
When Dad was courting our stepmother, the lovely Elizabeth, they surprised us all by becoming ardent opera enthusiasts. Each year they bought their season tickets. Then, weeks ahead of each performance, they began preparing by immersing themselves in musical recordings of the coming opera while reading along on the translated librettos. When the night arrived, they would dress in their best—for Dad this was formal wear complete with opera cape—and head downtown for a magic evening of music and drama.
Opera was one of the activities that we looked forward to enjoying with Dad when he moved to Denver toward the end of his life. During his two years with us we saw three live operas and many others on TV and DVD. In the process, Bill and I both grew in our knowledge …
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By Carol June 7th, 2011
Exploring the Gifts of Caregiving
Caregiving can be hard. Really, really hard. As Bill has said, it can feel a lot like rolling a boulder up a steep hill only to have it plunge back down to the bottom over and over again. I have also heard caregivers describe the job as an endless roller coaster ride or a long slog through a muddy marsh in the rain.
Part of what makes caregiving so challenging is that many of us start out knowing very little about the crucial medical, legal and social service domains that impact the elderly. When Bill and I were caregivers for my dad, Frank, we needed to master all sorts of new topics we truly did not want to know so much about–living wills and advance directives for example. The …
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By Carol April 12th, 2011
This year April is a month of celebration at our house. We are celebrating Bill’s retirement and the start of his post-retirement job at Four Mile Historic Park. Yesterday we celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. And April is also the month we celebrate one year of writing Inside Aging Parent Care. As part of the celebration I decided to republish one of our most viewed posts from last spring:
Gerotranscendence–Good News for Caregivers and Their Aging Parents By Carol May 23rd, 2010 Part Three of Three
Learning about the theory of gerotranscendence changed everything for me as a caregiver of an aging parent. In his book Gerotranscendence, Lars Tornstam talks about problems the mental set of younger caregivers can create when they are trying to understand the very old. We have been taught …
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By Carol August 30th, 2010
Recently I came across an essay by 20th Century fashion illustrator Polly Francis, the first of a three part series originally written for the Washington Post. Polly writes about her experiences of life as a nonagenarian:
“A new set of faculties seems to be coming into operation. I seem to be awakening to a larger world of wonderment—to catch little glimpses of the immensity and diversity of creation. More than at any other time in my life, I seem to be aware of the beauties of our spinning planet and the sky above. And now I have the time to enjoy them. I feel that old age sharpens our awareness.”
by Delia Margaret Tighe Francis (1884-1978), written at age 91 in “The Autumn of My Life,” Songs of Experience, Ballantine Books, 1991
Reading Polly’s …
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By Carol June 8th, 2010
When I became the primary caregiver for my elderly father, I was immediately confronted with my own fear of growing old. Everything I saw reinforced my belief that old-old age is a miserable stage of life leading to increasing loss, disappointment and painful isolation. Not to speak of unrelenting physical pain and debility. And fearful mental confusion and shameful loss of dignity. I tried hard to deny that this had anything to do with me, but of course my pain for my father was doubled by my mostly unconscious fear for myself.
I am not special or unusual in this—it is human to fear our own decline and death. And, like me, many of us try to ignore or deny the fear for awhile. At a certain point, I think we all feel the …
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