50 Questions to Ask Your Aging Parent
Fifty questions across seven themes, and honest advice on how to ask them without it feeling like an interview. The last section holds the ones families most often regret not asking.
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The dementia studies asked whether reminiscence improves memory. The better question was what it does to a marriage.
Trials measuring cognition and mood found small effects. The research that measured the relationship instead found gratitude toward a spouse, couples moving closer together, and something a memory scale was never going to catch.
Everything written about dementia assumes your parent is eighty. When it starts at fifty-five, none of the advice fits.
Young-onset dementia takes about a year and a half longer to diagnose than late-onset, memory care runs about $80,280 a year, and Medicare does not pay for it at any age. What changes when the person with dementia is fifty-five and still working.
The Most Famous Diaries in History Were Never Meant to Be Read
Pepys wrote in a shorthand nobody at home could read, Potter invented her own code, and Twain sealed his for a hundred years. What they were hiding from explains why most families end up with the wrong version of their parents.
You Don't Need More to Talk About. You Need Something to Look At.
I asked a caregiving forum how families spend time with an aging parent in a care facility. It drew about a hundred and fifty replies, and almost none of them named a conversation topic. Nearly all of them named a thing to look at.