So not long ago we met with a lovely lady called Kathy Kastner who has an interesting site at http://www.ability4life.com. We got to talking and she was interested in the fact that for years I worked in crisis communications, focusing on big bad things that happen to companies and governments. I had explained that early on, I would explain what happens in a crisis in terms of what happens to a family in a crisis. She wrote a short piece about it and I hope you will click on the link here and read it for yourself and see what you think.
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So it’s almost Mother’s Day. May 13th, eighty countries will honor mothers. And let’s not forget those older ones, either! Aging and elderly mothers and grandmothers are just as committed today as they were years ago. Whether they are suffering any health issues, stricken with Alzheimer’s or any other form of dementia, their deep, inner longing to be loved and valued surely remains intact and strong.

Take them flowers, give them a hug, say thank you… sincerely. They did their best, now let’s do our best to honor them.

What are you going to do this Mother’s Day?

Baby boomers need help juggling their own financial priorities with the needs of their dependent children and their aging parents….. more

By Stephen Winbaum of RetirementHomes.com with Bart Mindszenthy of mycarejourney.com Caregivers – aka the sandwiched generation – are caught in the middle, assisting aging loved ones and helping out adult children who have returned home…. more

So think about the old saying: you are what you eat. With elderly and aging loved ones, diet can really make the difference between reasonably good health and deteriorating health.

Have you checked to see what your parents are eating at each meal? Are they having three sound meals a day? Are they getting the right mix for what they need? Is the food fresh? Who cooks, how often?

There are lots of considerations and it would be a good thing to examine what your parents eat, how, how often, and what that does for them. Too often the elderly slide into poor eating habits that will actually harm their health.

Take a look, make an inventory, get advice from their family physician if you can or a licensed nutritionist at the least. Have you checked? Care to share with us?

So fact is that dementia comes in so many shapes and sizes. The most familiar to us is the Alzheimer’s disease. Now, as caregivers to aging parents or other loved ones, we need to become more conscious of watching for symptoms they may display.

The fact is that right now more than half a million Canadians are suffering from some form of dementia. That number will be in excess of a million within just twenty years.

While we can’t stop or reverse the onset of dementia, we can do a lot to better watch for the signs, learn strategies for managing it in our loved ones, and as a family determining how we’re doing to deal with it.

Early warning signs include obvious sort-term memory loss, poor longer-term memory retention, clear examples of disorientation, confusion and getting lost or wondering, and substantial repetitive behaviour. For the sake of all, we need to watch for the signs, not deny or ignore them!

Are you being proactive about watching for signs of dementia? Have any stories or examples to share with us?

A close friend not long ago told me about how his father-in-law had to be taken to the emergency room at their local hospital because of suddenly intensified irrational behaviour caused by some form of suspected cognitive impairment. Once diagnosed in the emergency room, his father-in-law was found to be sufficiently impaired to be admitted. My friend and his wife were very clear in warning hospital staff that the aging parent was prone to wandering and had to be watched closely. They were assured he would be.

Three hours later at four in the morning, my friend’s phone rang. It was the hospital. His father-in-law had vanished. No sight or sound of him. Lost. Not anywhere in the hospital or on the grounds. A search was launched. The 85-year old was found on a downtown street just before dawn in a hospital gown and his shoes, shuffling along and as amiable but confused as ever.

All ended well enough, but the lesson was blaring and profound: where were the safeguards, within the hospital, and attached to the patient? Aside from questions about access and egress safety precautions at all doors, more importantly is the question: if a patient is a known wanderer, why wasn’t a door alarm activating or tracking bracelet put on his wrist or leg?

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So you do what a lot of others in the same situation do: you keep pressing on, trying to do more, just wearing yourself down.

That’s often one of the consequences of caring for an aging parent or other older loved one. Lots of conflicts are happening: spousal wishes, work demands, grown kids who still need your attention, social time… and, focusing on those aging people who mean so much to you.

To help everyone and most importantly, to help yourself, pause periodically for a personal cause. Take a break. Hide for half a day. Skip out for a day. Go see a mindless movie, go fishing or skating or whatever gives you pleasure.

You can’t be at your best when you are run down, either mentally or physically, or, worse, both. Do you give yourself permission to pause for an important personal cause: your own wellbeing? Think about. And do it!

So you want to read a very captivating story of aging parents written by a loving son? It transcends decades and generations and has lessons we can file away for consideration still today. Try this wonderful, caring piece that was sent to me by a friend, written by Michael Gartner, newspaper editor and former president of NBC News…

My father never drove a car. Well, that’s not quite right. I should say I never saw him drive a car.

He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.

“In those days,” he told me when he was in his 90s, “to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it.”

At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in:
“Oh, baloney!” she said. “He hit a horse.”

“Well,” my father said, “there was that, too.”

So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The neighbors all had cars — the Kollingses next door had a green 1941 Dodge, the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford — but we had none.

My father, a newspaperman, would take the streetcar to work and my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.

My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we’d ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none. “No one in the family drives,” my mother would explain, and that was that.

But, sometimes, my father would say, “But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we’ll get one.” It was as if he wasn’t sure which one of us would turn 16 first.

But, sure enough, my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown.

It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn’t drive, it more or less became my brother’s car.

Having a car but not being able to drive didn’t bother my father, but it didn’t make sense to my mother.

So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving. The cemetery probably was my father’s idea. “Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?” I remember him saying more than once.

For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps — though they seldom left the city limits — and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.

Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn’t seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage.

(Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.)

He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin’s Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish’s two priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home.

If it was the assistant pastor, he’d take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church. He called the priests “Father Fast” and “Father Slow.”

After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going to the beauty parlor, he’d sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio. In the evening, then, when I’d stop by, he’d explain: “The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored.”

If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags out — and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream. As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, “Do you want to know the secret of a long life?”

“I guess so,” I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre..

“No left turns,” he said.

“What?” I asked

“No left turns,” he repeated. “Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic..

As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn.”

“What?” I said again.

“No left turns,” he said. “Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that’s a lot safer. So we always make three rights.”

“You’re kidding!” I said, and I turned to my mother for support.

“No,” she said, “your father is right. We make three rights. It works.”
But then she added: “Except when your father loses count.”

I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing.

“Loses count?” I asked.

“Yes,” my father admitted, “that sometimes happens. But it’s not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you’re okay again.”

I couldn’t resist. “Do you ever go for 11?” I asked.

“No,” he said ” If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can’t be put off another day or another week.”

My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999, when she was 90.

She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102.

They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom — the house had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.)

He continued to walk daily — he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he’d fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising — and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died.

One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news.

A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, “You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred.” At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, “You know, I’m probably not going to live much longer.”

“You’re probably right,” I said.

“Why would you say that?” He countered, somewhat irritated.

“Because you’re 102 years old,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, “you’re right.” He stayed in bed all the next day.

That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him through the night. He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said: “I would like to make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet”

An hour or so later, he spoke his last words:

“I want you to know,” he said, clearly and lucidly, “that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have.”

A short time later, he died.

I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I’ve wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long.

I can’t figure out if it was because he walked through life, Or because he quit taking left turns.

Life is too short to wake up with regrets. So love the people who treat you right. Forget about the ones who don’t. Believe everything happens for a reason. If you get a chance, take it and if it changes your life, let it. Nobody said life would be easy, they just promised it would most likely be worth it.

So just consider how much more difficult it is for most older parents and other loved ones to read the small type. And sometimes even the not-so-small type.

Try an easy and inexpensive way to help them read more easily: give them their very own, personal magnifying glass. They now come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Some have little light bulbs built in to provide added illumination. Some are the size of a sheet of paper and just as thin, helping see a whole page better at once.

That aging loved one likely will resist, but you need to persist. Make it non-threatening; make it an experiment just to try out what a magnifying glass might do. The results should amaze everyone.

Have you tried this? How did it go?