Reflections

1. What I Wish I'd Known About My Father's Death: Filmmaker Tamara Jenkins

   Reflection - Tamara Jenkins wrote and directed The Savages, a film about two adult siblings who must forge a relationship with their estranged father when they discover that he's suffering from dementia -- and doesn't have much longer to live. In the film, the Savage siblings put their father in a nursing home and are with him when he dies...

2. 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...

3. 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...

4. 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...

5. 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...

6. 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...

7. 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...

8. What I Wish I'd Known About Talking to a Dying Parent: Palliative Care Doctor David Kuhl

   Reflection - The author of What Dying People Want reflects on what he learned about having meaningful discussions with parents before they die.

9. 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...

10. 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...

11. 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...

12. What I Wish I'd Known About Caregiving Priorities: Caring.com Expert/Geriatric Psychologist David Solie

    Reflection - With all his expertise in helping seniors navigate their final years, you might think David Solie would have sailed through his years of care giving for his mother without any regrets. In fact, Solie -- a geriatric psychologist, the author of How to Say It to Seniors: Closing the Communication Gap With Our Elders, and a member of Caring...

13. 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."

14. 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...

15. 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...

16. 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...

17. 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!"

18. 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...

19. 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...

20. 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...

21. 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.

22. What I Wish I'd Known About Time and Alzheimer's: Television Host Leeza Gibbons

    Reflection - Time is the enemy of Alzheimer's sufferers and their caregivers, so it's not surprising that the theme of this year's World Alzheimer's Day, next Sunday, is "No time to lose." That's something popular TV personality Leeza Gibbons wishes she'd understood better when she became a caregiver to her mother...

23. What I Wish I'd Known About What I Had to Give as a Caregiver: Eldercare Expert Beth Witrogen

    Reflection - In 1991, Beth Witrogen's father, Mel, called from Wichita with the news: Her mother, Elaine, had Lou Gehrig's disease. What her parents had thought was arthritis was in fact a rare form of ALS with overlapping dementia. At the time, Elaine Witrogen was caring for Mel, who was partially disabled as a result of a 25-year battle with recurring spinal cancer...

24. 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...

25. 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.

26. 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...

27. 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.

28. 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...

29. 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...

30. 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.

31. 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...

32. 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.

33. 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...

34. 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.