When I tell my mum about my dream, she’s relieved, saying that she’s done everything to invite my grandma’s ghost into our home. For my mum, ghosts are not necessarily a bad thing – they can be, but that’s just like real life, she tells me. The afterlife is just an...
I’ve always loved the puzzle genre of video games. Starting with the Infocomm text adventures of the early 80’s through Myst and similar adventure games in the 90’s to recent classics like Portal, The Talos Principle, and The Witness, I’ve spent thousands of hours of...
Before my father’s decline, he was a preeminent scholar of Black religious history. As brilliant as he’d been, I wasn’t sure, at the end of his life, that he recognized me. He had died of dementia. Now here I was in quarantine, missing him while also working online...
Domestic and care workers make it possible for the rest of the economy to run. Yet they are an unprotected class of workers, mistreated and underpaid. Domestic workers were left out of the 1935 Fair Labor Standards Act—agriculture and domestic workers were...
"My husband is a remarkable caregiver. He knows how to talk to ER doctors and advocate for Ladybug if she has a hospital stay. Yet as I watched them pull off in the SUV, I had what felt like empty energy. I was anxious because I wasn’t going. ... “You seem unsettled,”...
Millions of Britons unable to manage without disability benefits could see their support slashed if the government diverts to a means-tested system. Regardless of income, beneficiaries can currently claim up to £627 in Personal Independence Payment (PIP) or £369 in...
People in America agree: Action is needed to support family caregivers. The John A. Hartford Foundation (JAHF) asked adults living in the United States for their opinions on policies to help family caregivers, including those recommended in the 2022 National Strategy...
When Nonna’s memory fails her, she returns to familiar gestures. On a weekend afternoon in winter 2021, she offers me a piece of hard licorice candy, piles of which sit dusty in a crystal dish on her coffee table. She suggests she put on a pot of espresso. Then, she...
This afternoon, I saw an off-Broadway play called Cost of Living, by Martyna Majok. It is a brilliant play that tells the stories of people who are brought together and who are caregivers or need them. I cannot deny that I was nervous about seeing the play. I am...
Parents of children with complex medical problems have higher rates of anxiety and depression. A new study in Child: Care, Health and Development looks at how traumatic hospital experiences play a role. University of Calgary researchers interviewed 22 parents whose...
Recovery simply means a movement toward preferred ways of living one’s life. Based on a conventional medical perspective that you may have encountered before, you might conclude that the goal is to ‘fix’ your loved one. However, a recovery-oriented perspective (which...
"My mom was taking care of her mom, who had Alzheimer's, [and] not telling anybody how hard it was or that she needed help, or that it was completely stressing her out," Revere says. "And then it became about me coming home to be in a house with three generations of...
My mother has an undiagnosed mental illness that makes her incapable of accepting reality and that has caused her to be emotionally abusive my entire life...What options do my sister and I have as she ages and her living situation deteriorates further? And what...
Over the last few years, I’ve been talking to my parents about death, in part because of my dad’s health complications, which include a pneumonia infection that nearly killed him last year. In my family, almost no subject is taboo, including death; often, my dad is...
My story speaks to the structural constraints on faculty members in “the sandwich generation” and on solo parents in academia. It is also the story of hard choices and toxic departments. Although I’m technically “middle aged,” I am the child of older parents and have...
Statistics usually form the basis of awareness campaigns. Rates of incidence, survival and mortality are humanised through personal stories, such as a child’s formative years given over to harsh and extended treatment cycles, or of a family grieving the loss of a...
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...
Within weeks of the Tarpy’s date, both knew they had found their forever partner. But three months after Mr. Contreras proposed in his Salinas, Calif., home in December 2016 and Ms. Long said an ecstatic “yes,” Ms. Long sat him down for a talk. “I told him, ‘Mark,...
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,...
There is a type of adult-child and parent relationship that rarely ever works out. It’s the one where the child feels like they’ll never be enough and the parent feels like they’re owed something for their labor. In this relationship, the child is “spoiled” and...