Camille Peri
Caring.com features editor
- About
Camille Peri, features editor, has covered health and family issues as a journalist for many years. She was a senior editor at Salon.com, where she was cofounder and editor of the department Mothers Who Think. She coedited two collections of essays, Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood , which was a national best seller and received an American Book Award, and Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race, and Themselves . Camille has also written and edited for WebMD, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Ladies' Home Journal, Parenting, San Francisco, and Mother Jones, and has been a book editor for Pearson Education. She has a B.A. in American Studies from the University of California at Berkeley.
Camille lives in San Francisco with her husband and two sons. With her children in their teen years and her parents in their 80s, she often feels that she's dealing with the same issues -- driving, safety, scheduling -- with both generations. Her mother survived a heart attack and cancer in 1999, and Camille and her brothers have spent periods providing their parents with round-the-clock care. She recently helped them move into an independent living retirement community, where they have opened -- and are thoroughly enjoying -- a new phase of their lives.
Recently Published on Caring.com
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Tuesday October 27, 2009
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Talking With David Kuhl: Honest Conversations With Dying Parents
Interview - Many people want to connect with their parents on a deeper level -- emotionally and physically -- before they die, but how exactly do you do that? And how do you know if that's what your parents want? 2 Comments
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Thursday August 27, 2009
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Talking With Gretchen Berland: Life in a Wheelchair
Interview - How can you truly understand what life feels like for a someone in a wheelchair? Borrowing from the old adage "walk a mile in my shoes," Gretchen Berland's documentary Rolling puts viewers in the wheelchairs of three individuals who must use them...
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Thursday August 06, 2009
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Talking With Michael Graves
Interview - As an architect and designer, Michael Graves is famous for combining purpose with wit and beauty, from the Swan and Dolphin hotels in Walt Disney World to the Humana Building in Louisville to his martini shakers for Target. But in 2003, when he became paralyzed from the mid-chest down -- most likely... 1 Comment
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Monday July 27, 2009
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What I Wish I'd Known About My Father's Will: Caring.com Legal Expert Barbara Kate Repa
Reflection - When her father died in 2003, Barbara Kate Repa had been an attorney for 22 years. She'd written often about eldercare issues and coauthored advanced versions of WillMaker, computer software that allows people to make their own wills and other legal documents, such as advance health care directives... 2 Comments
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Tuesday July 21, 2009
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Talking With Becca Levy: Age Stereotypes and Elder Health
Interview - “People act on the basis of their perception of reality,” a pollster for Ronald Reagan once said -- and in modern America, people’s perceptions are largely shaped by the media. The fascinating research that Yale psychologist Becca Levy is doing on images of aging in the media and...
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Friday June 05, 2009
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What I Wish I'd Known About a Parkinson's Diagnosis: Educator Rasheda Ali-Walsh
Reflection - The daughter of Muhammad Ali talks about the importance of discovering Parkinson's early.
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Thursday April 30, 2009
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What I Wish I'd Known About Family Dynamics and Parental Caregiving: Author Kelly Corrigan
Reflection - Kelly Corrigan was 36 years old and halfway through chemotherapy for breast cancer when she learned that her father had bladder cancer. As she recounts in her memoir The Middle Place, a New York Times bestseller, she immediately decided to lead the plan of attack for George Corrigan's cancer -- after... -
Talking With Kelly Corrigan
Interview - How do you deal it when your father who has been diagnosed with cancer picks a doctor based on his mutual love for lacrosse? Or when your parents decide to go to church instead for a second medical opinion? In her touching and surprisingly humorous memoir The Middle Place, a New York Times bestseller... -
What I Wish I'd Known About Death and Denial: Author David Rieff
Reflection - When intellectual and author Susan Sontag learned, at the age of 71, that she had a rare blood malignancy, she went into vehement denial about dying -- and demanded that her son, David Rieff, do so too. As Rieff writes in his memoir Swimming in a Sea of Death, he found himself forced into a lie, seizing... -
Talking with David Rieff
Interview - When novelist and intellectual Susan Sontag was diagnosed in 2004 with myelodysplastic syndrome, a precursor to a rapidly progressive leukemia, she had already beaten the odds of dying twice. Most remarkably, in 1975 she survived stage IV breast cancer partly by opting for a radical and arduous immunochemotherapy treatment... -
What I Wish I'd Known About Wheelchair Design: Architect/Designer Michael Graves
Reflection - One of the first things Michael Graves learned when he was paralyzed at the age of 68, in 2003, was that not all paralysis, or the pain that accompanies it, is the same. 'It's different for everyone, so it's very hard to plan for a device or even a therapy that will help everyone,' says a man famous... -
What I Wish I'd Known About Elders' Nonphysical Needs: Xtreme Aging Trainer Peg Gordon
Reflection - When Ida Hieb moved into a state-run nursing home in Ohio after a small stroke, it was supposed to be a short stay. She ended up living there until her death a few years later, at 98. During that time, her family -- including granddaughter Peg Gordon -- learned the hard way that many nursing facilities... -
Talking With Peg Gordon: How It Feels to Be Old
Interview - What does 85 really feel like? What's it like to recover from a stroke, go for a walk with diminished sight and hearing, or lose your senses of taste and touch? Xtreme Aging, an innovative "sensitivity training" program at the Macklin Intergenerational Institute in Findlay, Ohio, aims to let baby boomers and others find out for themselves... 3 Comments -
What I Wish I'd Known About Breast Cancer: Oncologist/Hematologist Hope Rugo
Reflection - When the family caregiver to a woman with late-stage breast cancer is a doctor, she knows exactly what to do, right? Not necessarily. Hope Rugo was an oncologist, hematologist, and professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco when her mother, Faith Weil Rugo, had a pelvic fracture... 1 Comment -
Talking With Hope Rugo: Dealing With Terminal Illness
Interview - Faith Weil Rugo was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer in 1982. When it returned several years later, her daughter, Hope, experienced the difficulties many family caregivers face: an uncommunicative oncologist, unexpected turns as the disease progressed, and uncertainty about how to talk to her mother about death... 1 Comment -
What I Wish I'd Known About Being a Working Mother and Caregiver: Filmmaker Julie Winokur
Reflection - In The Sandwich Generation and Living With Herbie, filmmaker Julie Winokur and photojournalist Ed Kashi turned their lenses on themselves, documenting their family's day-to-day struggle to care for Winokur's father, Herbie, through dementia... -
Talking With Julie Winokur: The Sandwich Generation
Interview - "Ed and I really thought we knew what we were doing," Julie Winokur says early on in The Sandwich Generation, an eloquent and sometimes brutally honest documentary that she and her husband, Ed Kashi, made while caring for her 83-year-old father. "We really felt like 'experts... 1 Comment -
Talking With Lillian Rubin: A Wake-Up Call for Aging Boomers
Interview - Lillian Rubin knows care giving intimately, from just about every angle. In her 70s, she was a caregiver to her mother until her death at the age of 94. Now in her mid 80s, Rubin is a caregiver to her 92-year-old husband, Hank, who has dementia. Her retired daughter, Marci, considers herself a caregiver to her parents... 1 Comment -
What I Wish I'd Known About Being Old: Psychologist/Sociologist Lillian Rubin
Reflection - Lillian Rubin would like you to know that 80 is not the new 60. In her latest book, 60 on Up, Rubin tries to dispel that and many other myths and slogans of the "new old age," including that "thinking young" and "brain nutrients" will somehow stave off age's inevitable corrosion. As she says in the feisty opening of her book: "Getting old sucks... 1 Comment -
Talking With Dudley Clendinen: Canterbury Tales
Interview - In 2000, Dudley Clendinen, a reporter and editorial writer for the New York Times and assistant managing editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, set out to write a book about the first generation of Americans who were reaping the benefits of an unprecedented life expectancy... -
What I Wish I'd Known About Strokes: Author Dudley Clendinen
Reflection - When strokes left Dudley Clendinen's mother unable to speak or walk, he and his sister didn't know how to relate to her anymore. Should they deal with their mother as they did when the "whole person" was there -- or just with the fraction of her that seemed to be left... -
Talking With Bob Morris
Interview - Shortly after Bob Morris's mother, Ethel, died of a rare blood disease in 2002, Joe Morris enlisted his son to find him a new sweetheart. Handing him the personals page from Jewish Week, the 79-year-old with a bum hip and a weak heart asked his 44-year-old single, gay son to make some contact calls to the women whose ads he had circled... -
What I Wish I'd Known About Nagging My Parents to Exercise: Author Bob Morris
Reflection - When his parents aged and slowed down, Bob Morris took it upon himself to get them back up and moving. After all, this is the "walk for the cure" era, and Morris is a member of a generation that, he writes, "has more faith in exercise than God... -
Talking With Jamieson Haverkampf: Mom Minus Dad
Interview - When Jamieson Haverkampf's father, John, learned that he had stage III non-Hodgkin's lymphoma at the age of 61, his family shifted into emergency mode to help him get well. And as he began chemotherapy treatments at the Massey Cancer Center near his home in Richmond, Virginia, the family was convinced... -
What I Wish I'd Known About Helping a Newly Widowed Parent: Author Jamieson Haverkampf
Reflection - "What I wish I'd known is how much assistance my mother needed from me and my sister," says Jamieson Haverkampf, who was only 30 years old when her father died of stage III non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, leaving her mother widowed at the age of 56. "I underestimated that." -
What I Wish I'd Known About Preserving Memories: Artist/Filmmaker Eleanor Coppola
Reflection - One of Eleanor Coppola's childhood memories is of her mother, Delphine Neil, writing at sunrise in her seaside cottage in Sunset Beach, California. "For many, many years, my mom wrote when she got up in the morning," Coppola says, "just on an index card, a few thoughts, like meditation. And after a while, she had hundreds of cards, and then thousands of them... -
Talking With Bill Thomas
Interview - Bill Thomas would like the epitaph on his tombstone to read, "He buried the nursing home." A geriatrician who became indignant about the state of nursing home care when he was the medical director for one in New York, Thomas is now one of the nation's most outspoken critics of institutional eldercare... 2 Comments -
What I Wish I'd Known About Nursing Homes: Geriatrician Bill Thomas
Reflection - When geriatrician Bill Thomas was the medical director of a nursing home in upstate New York in the early 1990s, he was asked to a see a patient -- a very old woman who had a rash on her arm. "I went to see her and diagnosed her rash and told her I was going to make it all better," Thomas says... -
Talking With Jacqueline Marcell: Dementia and Elder Rage
Interview - Care giving for a parent with Alzheimer's disease is notoriously difficult; care giving for a violent parent whose Alzheimer's goes undiagnosed can nearly kill you. The title of Jacqueline Marcell's book refers to different kinds of rage: her father's violent rage at her when she tried to help him and... 1 Comment -
What I Wish I'd Known About Alzheimer's, From Jacqueline Marcell
Reflection - For nearly a year, Jacqueline Marcell tried to get help dealing with her father, a man who had always had a temper but had abruptly become violent at the age of 82. Even after he physically attacked his daughter and was hauled off by the police, he would return to "normal" in front of a doctor or a judge and simply get sent home... -
Talking With Jill Bolte Taylor
Interview - People suffer strokes. If they don't recover an ability within six months, they'll never recover it. Stroke victims want to get back to who they were. 1 Comment -
What I Wish I'd Known About Stroke Recovery, From Jill Bolte Taylor
Reflection - In the midst of suffering a stroke, Jill Bolte Taylor may have been the only person who ever thought, "Wow, this is so cool!" -
What I Wish I'd Known About Caregiver Burnout, From Author Barbara McVicker
Reflection - During the ten years that Barbara McVicker was caring for her parents, working, and raising a family, she never took a day off. Impressive? McVicker -- who, with her daughter, Darby McVicker Puglielli, compiled caregivers' tales in Stuck in the Middle: Shared Stories and Tips for Caregiving Your Elderly Parents -- isn't bragging... -
What I Wish I'd Known About Life in a Wheelchair, From Doctor and Filmmaker Gretchen Berland
Reflection - In 2001, the doctor in Gretchen Berland wondered if physicians, nurses, professional caregivers, and others in the new era of "patient-centered care" really have a good enough grasp on their patients' lives and perspectives to center care around them... -
Talking With Hector Elizondo: When It Comes to Alzheimer's, Information Is Everything
Interview - Actor Hector Elizondo knows Alzheimer's disease intimately. In 2002, he estimated that dozens of people in his extended Basque-Puerto Rican family had or had been affected by the disease -- his mother and four aunts, who had it, and all of their family members... -
What I Wish I'd Known About the Toll Caregiving Takes: Actor Hector Elizondo
Reflection - Hector Elizondo isn't a psychiatrist. He just plays one on TV -- in the popular series Monk. So when Elizondo's real-life mother, Carmen, developed Alzheimer's disease in the '60s, he didn't fully realize the psychological costs to his father, Martin Echevarria Elizondo, who was her primary caregiver... -
Talking With Rasheda Ali-Walsh: Helping Children Cope with Parkinson's
Interview - Of the many courageous things Muhammad Ali has done in and out of the boxing ring, one of the most courageous is putting his body -- once a symbol of athletic power and grace -- into the public spotlight as it shows the increasing effects of Parkinson's disease... 1 Comment -
Talking With TV Personality Leeza Gibbons: Providing Support for Alzheimer's Caregivers
Interview - Most people know Leeza Gibbons from her ten years as host of the TV tabloid Entertainment Tonight, or her six years on the daytime talk show Leeza. But a growing number are beginning to know her for her efforts on behalf of those dealing with Alzheimer's disease, which grew out of her own family's experience... -
Talking With Beth Witrogen: Caregiving as a Spiritual Journey
Interview - Like everyone who takes care of an ill, elderly loved one, Beth Witrogen is well acquainted with the hardships of caregiving. In the early '90s, she was a long-distance caregiver to her mother, Elaine, who had ALS-plus syndrome -- ALS (or Lou Gehrig's disease) and Alzheimer's -- and her father, Mel, who had cancer... 2 Comments -
Talking With Thomas Graboys: A Physician's Battle With Parkinson's and Dementia
Interview - Everyone with Parkinson's disease has a unique story, Thomas Graboys writes in Life in the Balance: A Physician's Memoir of Life, Love, and Loss With Parkinson's Disease and Dementia. "Each of us brings to illness all of our life experience and the same complex emotional makeup we bring to every other aspect of our lives... -
What I Wish I'd Known About Parkinson's Symptoms: Doctor Thomas Graboys
Reflection - "What no one really tells you -- what no one can really articulate -- is that Parkinson's affects your life every millisecond, waking and sleeping, in ways that go from A to Z," says cardiologist Thomas Graboys, one of the many people whose Parkinson's includes Lewy body disease, an associated form of... -
What I Wish I'd Known About Coordinating Help: Web Entrepreneur Barry Katz
Reflection - In 2003, Carole Singer, a psychiatric nurse practitioner in Massachusetts, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. "Essentially, for the four years that she battled the cancer, there was probably no more than a two-month period when she wasn't in some sort of treatment," recalls her husband, Barry Katz. -
What I Wish I'd Known About Moving My Parents: Caring.com Moving Expert Donna Quinn Robbins
Reflection - In her 2003 book Moving Mom and Dad! Why, Where, How, and When to Help Your Parents Relocate, Donna Quinn Robbins quotes Donna Wagner, currently director of the Center for Productive Aging, summing up the complexities of caregiving for elderly parents: "You can be competent in every other part of your life and blowing this one... 1 Comment -
Talking With Donna Quinn Robbins: How to Discuss Moving With Your Parents
Interview - Early in On the Road of Life, Drive Yourself: A Vehicle for Aging Adults, Their Families, and Professionals to Help Navigate the Ups and Downs of Making Life Decisions, Donna Quinn Robbins shares one of her own family's stories. -
What I Wish I'd Known About "Elderspeak": Psychologist Becca Levy
Reflection - The first job Becca Levy had out of college was in the geriatric ward of a psychiatric hospital. Part of her work was to comfort elderly people being treated with electric convulsive therapy for depression; another part was sitting in on patient conferences. -
Talking With Kerry Weems: Medicare Advice for Caregivers
Interview - Tired of being on hold with 1-800-MEDICARE? Not sure if Medicare covers home health aides or nursing facilities? Overwhelmed just thinking about finding your parent a local doctor who accepts Medicare? -
What I Wish I'd Known About Local Resources: Medicare Administrator Kerry Weems
Reflection - Kerry Weems had been a longtime employee at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) when his wife, Jean, became a caregiver to her parents. For eight years, until 2007, Jean Weems and her sister cared for their mother, who had Alzheimer's, helping out their father, her primary caregiver, until his death... -
Talking With Barbara Kate Repa: Wills and Estate Planning
Interview - Twenty years ago, when attorney Barbara Kate Repa moved to the West Coast, she noticed that something was missing in her life: old people. Growing up, Repa had been very close to her grandmother and had always had a "yen for older people," she says, but in San Francisco she only knew people of her own "age and stage... -
Talking With Concetta Tomaino: The Power of Music
Interview - A man in his late 60s has a stroke and loses his speech. After two years of intense speech therapy, he still can't talk. From a treatment standpoint, he's considered "hopeless." -
What I Wish I'd Known About How Music Helps the Brain: Music Therapist Concetta Tomaino
Reflection - About 30 years ago, when Concetta Tomaino was getting a doctorate degree in music therapy at New York University and working mostly with special-needs children, she began an internship in the dementia ward of a nursing home. 1 Comment -
Talking With Joanne Koenig Coste: How to Help People with Alzheimer's Preserve Their Dignity
Interview - In Learning to Speak Alzheimer's:A Groundbreaking Approach for Everyone Dealing with the Disease, Joanne Koenig Coste writes about greeting a woman she knew in an Alzheimer's patient support group. 3 Comments -
What I Wish I'd Known About Lying to Someone With Alzheimer's: Joanne Koenig Coste
Reflection - Joanne Koenig Coste often tells the story of the day her husband, Charles, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's at the age of 46, scrubbed meticulously for two hours until he had removed all the Teflon from one of her pans. Instead of rebuking or correcting him when he waved the pan in the air like a trophy... 1 Comment -
Talking With Carol Levine: What Policymakers Can Do for Caregivers
Interview - In the heat of this fall's presidential campaign and the economic disaster that dominated it, most people may not have noticed that more attention was paid to the views of Joe the Plumber than to the plight of the family caregiver. One person who did notice was Carol Levine, the director of the Families... 2 Comments -
What I Wish I'd Known About How Difficult Transitions Are: Caregiving Advocate Carol Levine
Reflection - When the car Carol Levine's husband was driving skidded off an icy road and tumbled down an embankment in 1990, she was plunged in an instant into 17 years as a caregiver. Though Levine, a passenger in the car, was uninjured, Howard Levine sustained serious brain injuries. -
Talking With Hedda Bolgar: Getting Old Can Be Great
Interview - Like most Americans, psychoanalyst Hedda Bolgar was terrified as she watched the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. -
What I Wish I'd Known About Not Putting off Important Conversations: Hedda Bolgar
Reflection - Most of her contemporaries are long gone, but Hedda Bolgar, who will be 100 years old in August, is still a thriving, accomplished psychoanalyst. When she was 65, a year after the death of her husband, Herbert Bekker, she founded the Wright Institute Los Angeles to educate and train mental health professionals...
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Monday December 15, 2008
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Talking With Mary Ellen Geist: Don't Stop the Music
Interview - Measure of the Heart author Mary Ellen Geist on the rewards of caregiving for her father with Alzheimer's, and how music keeps them connected. -
What I Wish I'd Known About Being the "Designated Daughter": Alzheimer's Caregiver Mary Ellen Geist
Reflection - Measure of the Heart author Mary Ellen Geist talks about the new wave of single, professional daughters who are redefining parental caregiving.
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