Family caregiving is commonly viewed as an act of love. So much so that the phrase "caring for a loved one" is practically synonymous with family caregiving. But not every family experience is rooted in love. For example, children who have grown up with tense or even...
The policy began in the 1960s with the closure of psychiatric hospital beds — it was to be the first part of a plan to move people into the community. Over the next 20 years, more than 80 percent of the beds across Canada were closed, along with entire psychiatric...
A devastating new critique in the Washington University Law Review has spelled out how federal law punishes older couples for being married. It’s not just that if you meet and fall in love during your golden years you may be much better off staying unwed than tying...
I am the only family member with whom Jay maintained contact for the last three decades. Over that time, we communicated exclusively through email and cards I sent to a post office box. ... The hospital discharged Jay with a bag hanging from his chest to drain bile...
After helping Occupy Wall Street activists buy debt for a few years, Antico and Ashton launched RIP Medical Debt in 2014. They started raising money from donors to buy up debt on secondary markets — where hospitals sell debt for pennies on the dollar to companies that...
Writer and musician Tanuja Desai-Hidier lives in a multigenerational home in Maine with her aging parents and two teenage daughters. Between online schooling and "hematologists, nephrologists, cardiologists, rheumatologists, dermatologists, gastroenterologists,...
She said she had something to tell me but that she was afraid. I reached for her trembling hand, telling her sweetly, naïvely, that it would be okay, whatever it was, that we would be okay. She said she’d had leukemia and had thought it was in remission, but it was...
Consent is extremely important and vital to all aspects of dating, relationships, sex and just about any kind of interpersonal interaction. Whether you want to cuddle, make out, or have or continue some kind of genital sex you will always need to seek and get...
While the press applauds the tech sector’s forward-thinking and sensitivity to the needs of underserved populations, the concerns of disabled people—voiced again and again and again—are disregarded. So much uncritical attention gets lavished on these seductive yet...
New relationships - whether romantic, sexual, or both - are almost always exciting, no matter who you are. But for people with disabilities in relationships with neurotypical, nondisabled partners, new relationships can be filled with anxiety, including anxiety about...
Who cares? When picturing a caregiver, the person who comes to mind is almost invariably female. She is young (or young-ish). She looks healthy. She is usually in a uniform, the kind associated with nursing, to show that she is what she does. And she is never pictured...
That attack marked the beginning of our struggle to navigate a relationship transformed by trauma. Since then, I think I’ve read just about everything that has been written about how to support a loved one healing from post-traumatic stress. Among other things, I’ve...
A dearth of child care and elder care choices is causing many women to reorganize their working lives and prompting some to forgo jobs altogether, hurting the economy at a moment when companies are desperate to hire, and forcing trade-offs that could impair careers....
At the time, my mom was living in Bellingham, Washington, two years into providing unpaid live-in care for her father-in-law (my step-grandfather, who I reluctantly call “Grandpa,” despite not having much of a relationship with him). He was suffering from debilitating...
I began leaving voice-mail messages for my mother about a month after she died. It was February last year, during some of the darkest days of the pandemic for my family. My teenage daughters were mourning their grandmother while largely cut off from their friends and...
After my husband, Fernando, had been dead for about two years, I decided to fill out a profile on Match.com. Of course, on that particular evening, I’d drunk quite a bit of wine. ... While my husband was alive, my erotic fantasies did not involve him, but now they...
Although sleep is a need, it is a negotiable one. Societies have historically varied in their practices, and minorities have got by on less than is needed, sometimes for a lengthy period. Everyone weighs sleep against other priorities. This plasticity is what gives...
“I hope you’ll still laugh at my jokes when I have dementia,” I said to my husband Ryan on an evening walk not long after my thirty-fourth birthday. It was the first time I had tried out my new resolution to stop saying “if I get dementia” and to start referring to...
At first, my mother, the poet Anne Atik, had seemed just ordinarily confused. Then, very gradually, the confusion took on a pathological aspect. She awoke in the middle of the night thinking it was morning. On what turned out to be her last Eurostar journey, she...
The doctor told Ann that John had severely damaged his spinal cord and was paralyzed from his neck down. He was able to swivel his head from side to side, but because his circulatory system had been disrupted, causing his blood pressure to fluctuate wildly, he could...
His story? When Lythall was six-months-old, his mother, Irene, rushed him to CHEO where he had an emergency intubation that saved his life. He has rarely taken a breath without mechanical help since that day. He spent the next six years in CHEO’s intensive care unit,...
Millions of women in this country are caring for an aging parent or parents and for many, it’s not going so well. The career setbacks they may have experienced as a result of motherhood are compounded by the setbacks they are now experiencing as a result of...
Arbery, who grew up in Dallas with seven sisters in a conservative Catholic milieu similar to that of “Heroes,” had always wanted to write a play about his relationship with Julia, who is two years older (as she likes to remind him). But he didn’t want to write, as he...
The woman is my mother, who is 81 and losing her memory, the past dissolving each day like so many tablets dropped into water and turning to fizz. Do you know who they are? she says, speaking to me, because she realizes I’m there in the doorway. I’m visiting for a...