Aside from Spears’ battles in court — and the one raging among fans — some #FreeBritney folks are looking at the bigger picture: conservatorship law. While the number of conservatees in Spears’ home state of California is unclear due to lack of self-reports from some...
A diagnosis may be alarming enough, but equally frightening can be the costs for medical treatments, home renovations and other expenses. Some people with disabling conditions may be forced to retire earlier than they had planned, resulting in a loss of income and...
On a recent visit with research participants for my book on spousal caregiving, I sat with a man who had a stroke three years ago, at age 59. He can only use one side of his body, rendering him unable to work; his wife serves as his caregiver. He told me about how...
What my research participant made clear to me that day is that the lack of robust and accessible social programs for long-term care is merely a symptom of a deeper, more poisonous problem: Disability is a part of life, and we hate it. Literally. Here’s what we don’t...
My mother and father never married. This meant, as my mother explained, that I was his legal next of kin, responsible for making his medical decisions. This responsibility, already complex because of his lack of a living will, would prove to be even more fraught...
In December 2012, at age sixty-one, Judy received a diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer’s. The news was deeply distressing, igniting within me a burning anxiety over how I, a wheelchair user born with a spinal cord malformation and living with bunches of body parts...
Growing up with a mother who had schizophrenia, Max Alexander had first-hand experience as a young carer. “It gave me the resources to empathize, to be responsive to people,” he says. “This has been hugely important for my photography.” Years later, Alexander has...
Today, private equity firms are acquiring American hospices at an astonishing rate. From 2012 to 2019, the number of hospices owned by private equity companies tripled. The pace of acquisitions seems to have only gotten faster during the COVID-19 pandemic. Industry...
Under the 2010 health law, nonprofit hospitals are required to provide financial assistance to help patients pay their bills, and payment plans can be part of that assistance. But the Bennett family's experience shows the system is still far from friendly to patients....
Robert has cerebral palsy, and he has weathered multiple complications in his seven years. I don’t know what that’s like, to mother this beautiful boy through every hour of every day. I knew how to sister an amazing brother for thirty-one years longer than the doctors...
[Pauline] Boss, an emeritus professor of family social science — the study of families and close relationships — chose the place seven years ago because her husband’s declining health had made it difficult for him to climb the stairs of their house near the University...
A New York Times investigation found that at least 2,700 similarly dangerous incidents were also not factored into the rating system run by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or C.M.S., which is designed to give people reliable information to...
The first months after our partners passed away, we saw all the survival mechanisms we didn’t know we had, activated. One of us had to go to rehab and then shut herself in her parents’ house, refusing to go out. Another one started living two different lives: upbeat...
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...
Nobody just “stops by” this house. My mother won’t let anyone she knows come near the outside, much less invite them in. When she had her breast cancer surgery seventeen years ago, she was waiting at the curb, bag packed, for me to take her to the hospital. It’s 2016...
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...
The dichotomy of bathing has become axiomatic to understanding the collars of the labor force. White-collar workers shower before work. Blue-collar workers shower when they get home. Whites must arrive clean; blues must leave dirty. But there is another class of...
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...
As we know from classical traditions of mnemonic loci, like the memory palace, memory is often tied to place. When certain places fade from one’s imaginable and navigable universe, one’s mnemonic geography shifts, too. Your internal compass and your mental map will...
“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...