Soon after my 50th birthday, 10 years ago, I started keeping a list of “Things I will do/things I won’t do when I get old.” It was a highly judgmental, and super secret, accounting of all the things I thought my parents were doing wrong. My dad lied chronically about...
Your parents need your help right now, and so do your adult kids. But what about saving for your own retirement? If you’re stressed and stretched, it’s time to prioritize. The sandwich generation is defined as those who are caught in the middle of both parents and...
She showers once a week, and for the next six weeks—approximately four months into our new pandemic normal—I will be the one to bathe her. Her seniors’ program has been closed for months now, and it’s time for a plan. My aunt is tired of bathing her, and it looks like...
For the past decade, [Victoria] Levack has lived, reluctantly, at the Arborstone Enhanced Care facility in Halifax. She doesn’t dream of living in a castle; she just wants a bachelorette apartment where she can cook her own meals and choose recreational activities...
I am currently helping friends with their severely disabled child. The child needs round-the-clock supervision; this is especially challenging during the night, as someone must monitor the child’s condition at all times. Because of the pandemic and my friends’...
The turn of the millennium was marked by a litany of good intentions and disavowals of unequal treatment – by an endorsement, as the first article of the UN convention has it, of disabled people’s right to “full and effective participation in society on an equal basis...
“Since the pandemic, individuals are coping with so many different forms of stress that might be activating a compassionate part of them that they might not understand, which results in them feeling drained, overwhelmed, and depleted,” says Hillary Schoninger, a...
My father and I have not been especially close for all of my adult life because of his inability to communicate or relate to me, to others or to the world in general in a meaningful way. As he has aged, his danger and menace have pretty much disappeared, and he has...
For reasons I still can’t grasp, Conway — a brain-damaged burn victim with seven fingers — never could qualify for disability. Caroline was managing their day-to-day lives while working a low-wage job as a medical courier, picking up extra shifts when she could to...
The ache of watching a loved one grow smaller was hard enough. But I also wasn’t prepared for the way care-taking would force me to tamp down my queerness — and to become smaller myself. Despite coming out to my grandpa years ago, I still internalized the pressure to...
BuzzFeed News has scoured hundreds of thousands of court documents, obtained confidential mental health filings and financial records, examined hundreds of guardianship cases, gathered exclusive data from extensive public records requests, conducted hundreds of...
Gerontologists and psychology of aging experts say that “aging well” in your 60s and 70s is about preventing and delaying disability. It’s also about maintaining a high level of cognitive and physical functioning and remaining socially engaged. But aging well in your...
Some older adults have diligently prepared for their future. They purchased long-term care insurance when it was still affordable, then paid the premiums each month, even as they continued to rise. This is not the norm. Many adults have no plan at all, or assume that...
Currently, only three states in the country explicitly include special ed students in their sex-ed requirements. Six other states provide optional resources adapted for more accessible sex-ed curriculums. Thirty-six states fail to mention students with special needs...
Even in countries with robust universal health care, public health is usually an add-on; the vast majority of spending goes to treat the ailments of individuals. In Costa Rica, though, public health has been a priority for decades. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed...
This year, the federal government ordered hospitals to begin publishing a prized secret: a complete list of the prices they negotiate with private insurers. The insurers’ trade association had called the rule unconstitutional and said it would “undermine competitive...
For as long as Grevenitis can remember, being in public with Lulu has brought about a less welcome form of attention. Lulu was born with trisomy 21, or Down syndrome, the most common chromosomal anomaly diagnosed in the United States; the condition, which affects...
For older adults, social isolation may have dredged up past traumas that are difficult to come back from. And for those living in nursing homes that have been the center of outbreaks throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, these new traumas can make resuming care as usual...
The nation’s caregiving work force is fraying. Paid providers are overworked and undervalued, often forced to take on multiple jobs or turn to public assistance just to scrape by. Many family caregivers are struggling as well, sacrificing their own health and...
Some of the hardest conversations I have in my work involve telling families managing the debilitating chronic illness of a loved one at home that they are essentially on their own. Most do not realize that medical insurance does not pay for long-term home care....
As soon as we learned a new baby was on the way, Mike’s anxiety became more than an occasional visitor: It officially moved in. We recently had bought a family-size home with a yard in Seattle, and suddenly he saw danger everywhere. When someone you trust starts to...
For over a century, people living with Alzheimer’s disease and their caregivers have been caught in a vortex of uneven, frustrating progress. Even as late as the 1990s, medicine didn’t care much about people living with Alzheimer’s, which totals about 280,000 in...
Dementia had not robbed Lillian of her fiercely independent spirit, but it had made her verbally and sometimes physically aggressive, and she would fight back against caregivers other than Scott. Whenever Scott undertook essential errands, she depended on her mother...
It was in Stansted airport’s Pink Elephant car park that I realised all the adults were going home. It was early January 2007 and we had just returned from Mum’s funeral in Derry. I watched as uncles and aunts ambled over to their cars, and there the three of us were...