Aging Happens…

Aging Happens…

…and will involve our parents, ourselves, and our children. In this new millennium and with the tide of Baby Boomers surging forward, it is time to see past the cultural invisibility of Aging and engage in conversation about values, needs and positive, family inclusive solutions for Elder Care. The sentiment “Failing to plan is planning to fail” more acutely accurate when we neglect to anticipate the predictably changing needs of our parents. In “Holding Hands: Journeying with the Aging Family” you will learn:

• How the “nuclear family” model made our Elders invisible, and how to we must begin seeing them again

• The Co-Generational model: assessing each generation’s strengths and developmental tasks to help you envision an integrated network of support for all the family members in a maturing family system

• Strategies for initiating conversations between three generations to promote balance through planning

• Addressing the six core human needs (Thank you Tony Robbins!): certainty, uncertainty, significance, love, contribution, spiritual and personal growth and why we must help our Elders reconnect and stay connected with them

• Identifying resources so you know where to turn for support on a moment’s notice

• Creating “life plans” for the most common “unexpected” life events so small curves in the road don’t become critical collisions!

When uncertainty is the rule (and it becomes moreso as we age) Love is what remains at the core. Here’s to all the things that let peace and dignity blossom at such a challenging and transitional time: Validation. Respect. Empathy. Kindness. Thinking outside the box. Holding Hands: The Art of Parent Care provides an integrated approach to navigating the Journey of the Aging Family.

 

To reserve your copy of Holding Hands: The Art of Parent Care, please fill out the contact form below, and keep an eye on the blog for more exerpts of the book to be posted in the upcoming weeks!

 

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Have distanced from your Elders? Why do you think that happened?

I was listening to Brene Brown on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday recently.  She made a statement that struck me to the core. Initially, I thought of it in terms of my own life parenting adult children, working on building a new relationship. Musing on it for a couple days, though, I realized that this contributes to why — as a culture of middle aged adults — we distance from our family Elders. Brene stated “When we lose our capacity for vulnerability, joy becomes foreboding.”

“What makes us vulnerable?” Risking the pain of losing a parent you love and adore and know really well is being REALLY vulnerable to loss, pain, self doubt and regret. As our parents and other Elders age, we know that we will, ultimately, have to say goodbye. We will experience loss (statistically speaking). To fully engage with our parents as they age, as their abilities change or decline, as they need us more as advocates and companions and not just as children, is to open ourselves up to the pain of letting them go after becoming very engaged and attached. That is something, perhaps, worth defending your heart against (or not, more on that to follow).

The second part of that quote is that “Joy becomes foreboding”. When we are afraid of being vulnerable and truly open to the moment without fear of what may or may not happen down the road, even happy moments generate tension. When I had a great day with my mother, I often felt pre-emptive grief, realizing that these were special days and numbered. How much better it would have been for both of us if I could have just experienced the joy without the foreboding. Would I have shown up for her better? More often? It is something I contemplate in other relationships now.

There are many reasons why people distance from aging relatives and friends.  Their changing or dissolving abilities challenge us.  It isn’t easy to be with some people — communication is difficult due to physical changes (loss of hearing for example); cognitive changes (from mild to advanced dementia, depression and ensuing negativity), to powerlessness which makes people feel hopeless for any positive change in their situations.  Hopelessness is hard to cope with in someone we love, someone we want to help out.  Too often it seems that our Elders don’t want help, they just want to complain.  This may actually be more a symptom of depression (which is a common and treatable disease among Elders), than an overall personality change.

We may distance because WE feel powerless and hopeless.  “There’s nothing I can do, anyway.”  (A self-fulfilling prophesy if ever there was one).  “They don’t want my help” (No, but they might want your attention, to know that they aren’t alone in this last walk around the block).  “They live too far away” (how can you mitigate that through phone calls or setting them up with social media?).

This is what I have learned about distancing and avoidance.  Our parents will likely precede us in death (mine already have).  In the case of my father’s death, he was young and it was unexpected.  There was no planning for, preparing for, working out old issues.  It just happened, and there we all were, carrying around the things left unsaid and undone.  That is the stuff regrets are made of.  Regret, like disappointment, is an emotional experience I go out of my way to avoid.

My mother’s last years were quite different.  Yes, I often woke up in the middle of the night with a start and wondered if she had just fallen.  Yes, we lived from crisis to crisis because there was a lack of communication and planning for quite predictable events.  Yes, some days I thought a week-long rest in the local behavioral health inpatient unit would be just the ticket for me (thankfully I never had to use that extreme back up plan).  In the long run though, I have powerful memories of my mother.  Her grandchildren, who engaged with her often showering her with love and attention and likewise being recipients of the same — have great stories to share.  In her last years, my mother imparted her values, her humor, her resiliency on that next generation.  That didn’t happen all at once but over time, over ice cream and Scrabble boards, card games and coloring books, Sunday dinners held at her house even if the best she did was Shake and Bake chicken strips, mashies and salad.  We watched together as her abilities diminished.

My mother’s passing came as a completion of several years of work in which we loved on her, were devoted to her comfort and quality experiences.  With our help, she remained in her home until just shy of her 88th birthday, moving to an adult foster home the week before.  I sat with her daily.  We knew her favorite music, and it played in the background.  We knew the stories she liked to hear re-told, and we shared them.  We placed phone calls to people she needed to hear loved her, one more time.  Our pastor came and sorted out some last issues around shame.  When my mother passed, it was quiet, gentle, complete.  I have never looked back and thought “I wish I had only….”, because we chose to be present with her.  Choices were made that were temporary sacrifices for a lifetime of peace (mine and my children’s).  When we think of my mom and the void her absence sometimes creates for us, it is with a sense of love and acceptance.  There is no guilt.  No regret.  We allowed ourselves to be vulnerable to the pain, and in the process, allowed ourselves to experience the love and  joy that spending time with her gave.

 

I challenge you to look at current patterns with  Elder family members. What stands in the way of regular communication: Geographical distance? Technological deficits? Unresolved relationship issues? The belief that parents are the responsibility of another besides you? Time constraints?  Upon further examination, are any of those things possibly excuses to help you maintain a safe emotional distance from the reality of aging or end of life issues, for yourself or your parents? Feel free to comment below, and as always, feel free to share this blog with others walking this middle of life walk.

The Art of Parent Care: Help me know what you need.

Thank you for filling out my poll.  I hope to use this information to guide me in my blogging, so I am addressing the issues most pressing to my readers.  Remember, we’re all in this together!

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Happy Memorial Day (weekend)

Tribute to a family of participants:  The Ledford Loughead clan (my father is the baby), Oliver P. Ledford with Sea Bees on Tinian, WWII, and with support staff in Viet Nam; Eva Heineck and Katherine Heineck, USCG Spars.
Tribute to a family of participants: The Ledford Loughead clan (my father is the baby), Oliver P. Ledford with Sea Bees on Tinian, WWII, and with support staff in Viet Nam; Eva Heineck and Katherine Heineck, USCG Spars.

Holidays are a time for establishing and maintaining rituals. This last weekend in May is generally harkened as the first weekend of “summer”, play time, fun time, get-outside-in-the-sun time. We think of beaches and blankets, the smell of sunscreen and water and how there really is sand in sandwiches. The boat goes in the water, the tent gets popped up, someone gets too drunk and spoils the whole affair. Memorial Day!

Holiday rituals connect us to family gone before us. Some rituals we keep, some we let go, some adapt in collaboration with a lover or mate who brings their own with them. My father kept holidays well, though I didn’t always appreciate that. With Christmas, of course, the better kept the happier the children are, and my dad could keep Christmas very, very well! Memorial Day was harder for me as a child.  While friends would be camping or playing and enjoying the three day weekend, and he loaded us up and drove to a town I was unfamiliar with, spent time talking to people 5 decades my senior (oh how I wish I had that time back now!) and took flowers to his parents’ gravesites. I recognize now that like Christmas traditions, my father also kept Memorial Day… very well.

My father passed away 36 years ago. He’d be 99 this year (so if he’d survived the heart attack at 63, he’d still be gone by now). Memories don’t do “time” though. He is as alive for me this Memorial Sunday as he ever was, and I get to go visit him today. My 21 year old daughter will be with me to hear the stories, see the place, walk through old neighborhoods, clean the headstone, admire the cherry tree and with love and attention, place flowers and a flag. It took thinking I couldn’t go this year (and I’ve  missed 25 due to relocating far from my home town and his resting place) for me to realize how imperative it was that I go. Through all the automotive travails we have had in the last three days I thought it impractical to make the 3 hour trip “home”. I tried to console myself with setting up a small Memorial Day alter for my parents, but the thought of this man — who voluntarily served in two wars — having an empty headstone struck my heart and I realized that…. I had to go.  I had to make my love and respect for him made visible on this Memorial Day.

Through the ritual my father taught me all those uncomfortable childhood Memorial Day weekends ago, I have a cellular imperative to honor him the same way, to take my own daughter, who never knew this wonderful man, and make him real to her. My mother, whose ashes remain above ground as yet, will one day rest with him, and a more complete family reunion will take place, at least this one day a year. Hopefully, there will always be a child there to hear the stories, for it is in our rituals of remembering that we share our oral histories with our offspring. Through ritual, we teach those that come after us the values we cherish.

I never knew my grandparents, both died before I was born. I understand better the love and respect my father had for them, demonstrated by honoring them, publicly, at least this one weekend a year. They made him the man he became and through him, helped craft me into the woman that I am today and the man I see my own son becoming.

We are not disconnected from our family histories. They live in us and through us, are passed to our children whether we attend to their memories or not. Similarly, while our families are living, whether we ignore their needs, put off the phone calls, imagine that everything is “alright, or they’d call me”, we are not disconnected from them and their influence upon us.

The Post War (that would be WWII) cultural shift away from extended family and to the ‘burbs has been an interesting social experiment in fracturing the family, and it hasn’t worked out so well. When denied the comfort and company of multiple generations, aging has become isolating and demeaning, where too often Elders feel they are “less than” if they require assistance from others.  By ignoring rituals and connectedness (my mother made Sunday dinner for us for years, that became “our time”), we forget to teach our own children the importance of family connection, those generational bonds that sustain us when the world shakes beneath our feet.  Cooperation and collaboration support multiple generations of family so knowledge is saved and wealth is condensed.  I hope that as a unique American culture, we will come again to defy the idea that we are all independent, autonomous islands, sustainable on our own. This Memorial Day, I call you to remember, and then to share.

Blessings to you and yours,
Katherine