Aging Care Coach

Alright, my friends. We have battled Black Friday, supported local on Small Business Saturday, and spent many screen hours on Cyber Monday. Now, let's take a few moments to reflect on the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. How did it go for you as you balanced the holiday with caregiving for someone living with dementia? Were there tough lessons learned the hard way about what your loved one with dementia can tolerate at this point? Were there special moments of connection with your loved one? I hope there were more of the latter and less of the former. I'd love to hear the good, the bad, and the ugly. We can all learn from each other.  One of my favorite sayings is “when we know better, we do better” and that holds very true in dementia care. Certainly, we have good intentions and want the best for our loved ones. Yet when we don’t have a good understanding of their brain changes and how to best support them, we can at times contribute negatively to the experience. This topic ...

A well-intentioned daughter whose mother is living with dementia recently attended my "Sharing Holidays" talk in New England. During the Question & Answer time, the daughter explained that last year, she brought her mother to her (the daughter's) home for Thanksgiving. They had a nice afternoon of visiting and her mother seemed to be doing ok, despite some confusion and memory changes. The daughter went on to explain that right as they sat down for the 'big meal' - you know what I mean, turkey hot out of the oven, all the sides finished in perfect time and delivered to the table, grandchildren wrangled and placed at the "kids table", and the matriarch with dementia lovingly and respectfully escorted to the head of the table for the meal - when her mother stated "this has been lovely, can someone please take me home." She spared the details, but I got the sense that it their interaction went south from there. Her  question to me was what to ...

There was too much to share about dementia & holiday planning in the last post, so I wanted to share more in a follow-up. Here we go, let's be real here... Many of us have a Norman Rockwell scene in our heads when we plan for the holidays.  Am I right?  In reality, our family scenes look more like a combination of  Everybody loves Raymond, Rosanne, and the Sopranos.  The holidays can be overstimulating and emotional for many of us. When caring for someone who is living with dementia, it can be tempting to overdue All. The. Things. Especially our expectations. (Warning: Real Talk!) As we watch a loved one decline with dementia, it's natural to wonder if this could *gulp* be their last holiday. Consequently, we have the dangerous combination of heightened expectations mixed with sadness that dementia is slowly taking away our loved one.  Caregiver grief rises and is often masked by the desire to make the most of the day, the holiday. ...