Daughterhood Updates
6 Features of Long-Term Care Insurance You’d Never Guess But Need to Know
It feels a little silly to be writing about long-term care insurance because only about 10% of the older adult population has purchased it. But, it comes up a lot in conversations I have with friends and family… either they’re thinking of buying it or they or their...
4 Essential Tips for Finding the Best Home Care for Your Parents
The vast majority of frail older adults live at home -- not in independent or assisted living and not in nursing homes. So, If you’re managing your parents’ care, sooner or later you’ll come up against the question of whether you should get them more help at home and...
The Top 3 Myths Most Women Believe About Paying for Long-Term Care
If you haven’t stopped to think about whether you’ll need to be taken care of when you are very old or how you’d pay for it, believe me, you are not alone. But, if you are a woman, this is a question you cannot afford to avoid. As Dr. Atul Gawande explains in his...
5 Safety-First Strategies for Your Parents’ Hospital Discharge
You’ve navigated your frail parent’s hospital stay and now it’s time to go home. You probably can’t wait to leave but ...what’s coming next is extremely uncertain. Leaving a hospital with a frail older adult in tow is like stepping off a cliff blindfolded. This blog...
3 Start-Up Business Strategies That Work for Daughterhood
I’ve always had a hard time with planning. I find the process of "thinking things through" boring and tedious. Occasionally this impulsiveness gets me in over my head. Like the time I ordered 20 zillion ivy seedlings for the shady part of my backyard without realizing...
4 Must-Know Tips for Your Parent’s Hospital Stay
It always comes as a shock to me that being likeable doesn't solve all my problems. In my mind, being accommodating is the key to being likable. Of course, the problem with this thinking is that occasionally all that pent up accommodation and desire to be likeable...
4 Common Traps To Avoid in Making the Move to Assisted Living
I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself Maya Angelou About two months after my husband moved out, I noticed an awful smell coming from somewhere in the kitchen. I spent a whole week trying to locate the source. My kitchen cabinets have...
How Softball and Starbucks Taught Me a Valuable Lesson About Being a Good Parent and a Good Daughter
I’ve been noticing that when I get caught in the undertow of feeling like a failure at parenting, it makes me really angst-y and hyper-controlling with my kids, especially my 15-year-old daughter, Grace. This happened last week when, mid-stream in spring softball...
Daughterhood: The Ultimate Career Disrupter
The end of life transition from independence to dependence for a frail older adult is terrifying to experience and to observe. Our desire to preserve the dignity of our parents through this process completely and totally dwarfs any professional or personal ambition.
Your Parent’s Death: Facing Fear and Finding Meaning
In my next life, I want to come back as Dr. Kathy Selvaggi, the palliative care doctor who appears in a new Frontline documentary series about how our health-care system handles end-of-life care. I think we should all idolize clinicians who escort people to and from life — midwives, labor, and delivery nurses on the one hand, and hospice nurses, chaplains, and palliative care physicians like Dr. Selvaggi on the other.
Dr. Kathy Selvaggi and Dr. Atul Gawande (author of Being Mortal, the book on which the Frontline series is based) both say that it is really, really hard coming to the realization you or a loved one is dying. They tell us that, for most people, when it comes to dying: Fear Rules.