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...