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To care for those who once cared for us is one of the highest honors.
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Tia Walker (The Inspired Caregiver: Finding Joy While Caring for Those You Love)
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Caregiving often calls us to lean into love we didn't know possible.
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Tia Walker (The Inspired Caregiver: Finding Joy While Caring for Those You Love)
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In the heart or every caregiver is a knowing that we are all connected. As I do for you, I do for me.
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Tia Walker (The Inspired Caregiver: Finding Joy While Caring for Those You Love)
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I love you but I got to love me more.
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Peggi Speers (The Inspired Caregiver: Finding Joy While Caring for Those You Love)
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By loving you more, you love the person you are caring for more.
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Peggi Speers (The Inspired Caregiver: Finding Joy While Caring for Those You Love)
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The power of intuitive understanding will protect you from harm until the end of your days.
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Lao Tzu
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The phrase 'Love one another' is so wise. By loving one another, we invest in each other and in ourselves. Perhaps someday, when we need someone to care for us, it may not come from the person we expect, but from the person we least expect. It may be our sons or daughter-in-laws, our neighbors, friends, cousins, stepchildren, or stepparents whose love for us has assigned them to the honorable, yet dangerous position of caregiver.
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Peggi Speers (The Inspired Caregiver: Finding Joy While Caring for Those You Love)
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Embracing a healing presence requires you to just be in the moment together.
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Nancy L. Kriseman (The Mindful Caregiver: Finding Ease in the Caregiving Journey)
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Never give up hope! If you do, you be dead already.
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Rose in The Inspired Caregiver
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It was a town mostly populated with elderly John Wayne fans and their caregivers.
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Lark Benobi (The Book of Dog)
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Never give up hope. If you do, you'll be dead already.--Dementia Patient, Rose from The Inspired Caregiver
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Peggi Speers (The Inspired Caregiver: Finding Joy While Caring for Those You Love)
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My caregiver mantra is to remember 'The only control you have is over the changes you choose to make.
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Nancy L. Kriseman (The Mindful Caregiver: Finding Ease in the Caregiving Journey)
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Offering care means being a companion, not a superior. It doesn’t matter whether the person we are caring for is experiencing cancer, the flu, dementia, or grief.
If you are a doctor or surgeon, your expertise and knowledge comes from a superior position. But when our role is to be providers of care, we should be there as equals.
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Judy Cornish (The Dementia Handbook: How to Provide Dementia Care at Home)
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Never give up hope. If you do, you'll be dead already.-- Dementia Patient Rose in The Inspired Caregiver
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Peggi Speer and Tia Walker
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My caregiver mantra is to remember: the only control you have is over the changes you choose to make.
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Nancy L. Kriseman (The Mindful Caregiver: Finding Ease in the Caregiving Journey)
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Caregiving will never be one-size-fits-all.
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Nancy L. Kriseman (The Mindful Caregiver: Finding Ease in the Caregiving Journey)
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I believe that most caregivers find that they inherit a situation where they just kind of move into caregiving. It's not a conscious decision for most caregivers, and they are ultimately left with the responsibility of working while still trying to be the caregiver, the provider, and the nurturer.- Sharon Law Tucker
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Peggi Speers (The Inspired Caregiver: Finding Joy While Caring for Those You Love)
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As your care recipient’s advocate, be involved, don’t accept the status quo, and don’t be afraid to voice your concerns.
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Nancy L. Kriseman (The Mindful Caregiver: Finding Ease in the Caregiving Journey)
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One goal of the mindful caregiver is to find ways to not feel ‘dis-eased’ in the caregiving process.
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Nancy L. Kriseman (The Mindful Caregiver: Finding Ease in the Caregiving Journey)
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Age On Purpose. Be intentional in your journey. You define aging. Don't allow aging to define you. It renders helplessness.
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Macie P. Smith (A Dementia Caregiver's Guide to Care)
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Many caregivers share that they often feel alone, isolated, and unappreciated. Mindfulness can offer renewed hope for finding support and value for your role as a caregiver…It is an approach that everyone can use. It can help slow you down some so you can make the best possible decisions for your care recipient. It also helps bring more balance and ease while navigating the caregiving journey.
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Nancy L. Kriseman (The Mindful Caregiver: Finding Ease in the Caregiving Journey)
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Even though people experiencing dementia become unable to recount what has just happened, they still go through the experience—even without recall.
The psychological present lasts about three seconds. We experience the present even when we have dementia. The emotional pain caused by callous treatment or unkind talk occurs during that period.
The moods and actions of people with dementia are expressions of what they have experienced, whether they can still use language and recall, or not.
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Judy Cornish (The Dementia Handbook: How to Provide Dementia Care at Home)
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Caring Across Generations, led jointly by twenty organizations representing caregivers, care consumers, and their families, is a national movement to embrace our changing demographics, particularly the aging of America, and an opportunity to strengthen our intergenerational and caregiving relationships.
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Ai-jen Poo (The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America)
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The problem is understaffing. The problem is undertraining. The problem is high caregiver turnover. The problem is paying minimum wage. The problem is the eldercare industry. (I could go on, and so I will: The problem is undervaluing the elderly. The problem is fear of aging. The problem is fear of dying.)
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Lauren Kessler (Dancing with Rose: Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimer: One Daughter's Hopeful Story)
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High-quality and affordable childcare and eldercare • Paid family and medical leave for women and men • A right to request part-time or flexible work • Investment in early education comparable to our investment in elementary and secondary education • Comprehensive job protection for pregnant workers • Higher wages and training for paid caregivers • Community support structures to allow elders to live at home longer • Legal protections against discrimination for part-time workers and flexible workers • Better enforcement of existing laws against age discrimination • Financial and social support for single parents • Reform of elementary and secondary school schedules to meet the needs of a digital rather than an agricultural economy and to take advantage of what we now know about how children learn
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Anne-Marie Slaughter (Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family)
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But no matter how carefully we schedule our days, master our emotions, and try to wring our best life now from our better selves, we cannot solve the problem of finitude. We will always want more. We need more. We are carrying the weight of caregiving and addiction, chronic pain and uncertain diagnosis, struggling teenagers and kids with learning disabilities, mental illness and abusive relationships. A grandmother has been sheltering without a visitor for months, and a friend's business closed its doors. Doctors, nurses, and frontline workers are acting as levees, feeling each surge of the disease crash against them. My former students, now serving as pastors and chaplains, are in hospitals giving last rites in hazmat suits. They volunteer to be the last person to hold his hand. To smooth her hair.
The truth if the pandemic is the truth of all suffering: that it is unjustly distributed. Who bears the brunt? The homeless and the prisoners. The elderly and the children. The sick and the uninsured. Immigrants and people needing social services. People of color and LGBTQ people. The burdens of ordinary evils— descriminations, brutality, predatory lending, illegal evictions, and medical exploitation— roll back on the vulnerable like a heavy stone. All of us struggle against the constraints places on our bodies, our commitments, our ambitions, and our resources, even as we're saddled with inflated expectations of invincibility. This is the strange cruelty of suffering in America, its insistence that everything is still possible.
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Kate Bowler (No Cure for Being Human: And Other Truths I Need to Hear)
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8. Chapter 4 describes the birth of the assisted-living facility concept (Park Place), designed by Keren Wilson to provide her disabled mother, Jessie, with caregivers who would not restrict her freedom. Key components included having her own thermostat, her own schedule, her own furniture, and a lock on the door. What does it mean to you to treat someone with serious illness as a person and not a patient? 9. In 1980, an eighty-year-old man named Harry Truman refused to move from his home as Mount St. Helens began to erupt. He told authorities that at eighty years old he had a right to decide his fate. Do you agree? What are the implications for individuals and families when elder adults are given full autonomy over their lives?
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Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
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But really, why should the Cailleach matter now? Why should the other fierce and shining old women of European myth and folklore who populate the pages of this book matter? Why should any of these old stories matter? Aren’t they just ancient history? Nice to know, but irrelevant to our infinitely more sophisticated lives today? Well, they matter because the ways in which we think about aging depend on the stories we tell about it. How we think about aging women depends on the images we hold of them. And the images we hold of aging women today aren’t healthy. Truth is, there is no clear image of enviable female elderhood in the contemporary cultural mythology of the West; it’s not an archetype we recognize anymore. In our culture, old women are mostly ignored, encouraged to be inconspicuous, or held up as objects of derision and satire. But our old mythology and folklore tell us something very much more interesting: that it hasn’t always been so. In our more distant past, as of course in many indigenous cultures today, female elders were respected and had important and meaningful roles to play. They are the ones who hold the myths and the wisdom stories, the ones who know where the medicine plants grow and what their uses are. They serve as guides for younger adults; they’re the caregivers and mentors for the community’s children. They know when the community is going to the dogs, and they’re not afraid to speak out and say so. When they do, they’re listened to. Their focus is on giving back — on bringing out, for the sake of Earth and community, the hard-earned wisdom which they’ve grown within themselves.
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Sharon Blackie (Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life)
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Similarly, we see a common discriminatory assumption embedded in our view of a woman’s caregiving years spent out of the paid workforce as a yawning gap on her résumé and our failure to include the hundred million–plus hours of unpaid care work done in households across the country every year in our national GDP. In both cases we assume that care work is not work that really matters, even though it is essential to the dignity and the wellbeing of the elderly and the sick and to the very brain formation and growth of the young. Nor do we assume that it can in any way benefit the caregiver in ways that are individually valuable and desirable in other contexts.
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Anne-Marie Slaughter (Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family)
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Even though people experiencing dementia become unable to recount what has just happened, they still go through the experience—even without recall.
The psychological present lasts about three seconds. We experience the present even when we have dementia. The emotional pain caused by callous treatment or unkind talk occurs during that period.
The moods and actions of people with dementia are expressions of what they have experienced, whether they can still use language and recall, or not.
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Judy Cornish (The Dementia Handbook: How to Provide Dementia Care at Home)
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To find meaning in our lives we need consistent exposure to kids, elders and animals... cuz kids and animals aren't looking for it, and elders are the closest to finding it.
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Gregor Collins (The Accidental Caregiver: How I Met, Loved, and Lost Legendary Holocaust Refugee Maria Altmann)
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The number of Canadians providing or expecting to provide eldercare in need is already a staggering statistic. Baby boomers are aging and this figure is likely to grow substantially.The Caregiver's Guide for Canadians will provide you with valuable advice to help you provide good eldercare while balancing all the demands on your time. It provides practical, realistic guidance; encouragement and insights to help you care for elders in need.
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Rick Lauber
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When someone you love has dementia, you too experience a form of anticipatory grief, but yours may extend over a longer period of time (for some, as long as 20 years) and be socially unrecognized and surrounded by uncertainty.
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Wolfelt PhD CT (Healing Your Grieving Heart When Someone You Care About Has Alzheimer's: 100 Practical Ideas for Families, Friends, and Caregivers (Healing Your Grieving Heart series) by Wolfelt PhD CT, Alan D., Duvall MD, Kirby J. (2011) Paperback)
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But it’s more than an absence of spouses that complicates caregiving and companionship later in life. People are having fewer children, if they have children at all. This, in combination with marriage trends, has increased the number of older adults with no close family ties—a group of people whom sociologists call “elder orphans,” “solo agers,” or “kinless.” Researchers estimate that one in five older adults is an “elder orphan” or at risk of becoming one, a figure that is likely to grow in coming years. Like marriage, having children isn’t a surefire insurance policy for caregiving. Adult children might not live close to their parents, or their kids might not have the capacity to help. Daughters, historically the country’s default caregivers of aging parents, can’t be taken for granted as a source of uncompensated caregiving these days. Far more women are in the paid labor force and would jeopardize their economic security or their family’s if they quit their jobs to take care of their parents. (Nevertheless, on average, daughters spend far more time caring for their aging parents than sons do.) Because Americans are having kids later in life, it’s common for children with aging parents to be raising children of their own at the same time; these are members of the so-called sandwich generation. Unable to manage both forms of care, these adults may focus on their kids and outsource care for their parents.
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Rhaina Cohen (The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center)
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[Q: What would you change if you could?]
I would probably make care an organizing principle in our economy. I would try to reorganize our economy so that care in all of its forms-care for neighbors, care for family, care for children, care for elders, care for friends, care for co-workers-is a fundamental principle in every arena of civic and economic life. I would want us to have all the support we need, so that the caregiving relationships in our lives would be upheld as some of the most important and valuable. People who provide care would feel recognized and valued, and be able to support their families. We would utilize care as a way of reinventing our relationships and our structures of value-it would change everything.
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Ai-jen Poo
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Our certified, bonded, and insured caregivers provide in home care, elderly care, senior care, companionship, meal preparation, medication reminders, errands, light housekeeping and laundry, to help with bathing, dressing, grooming, incontinence care, 24 Hour Care, Live in Care, Alzheimers and Dementia Care. We provide home care in Boca Raton, Delray beach, Mission Bay, Boca Del Mar, Sandalfoot Cove, Whisper Walk, Highland Beach, High Point, Kings Point, Gulf Stream and surrounding areas.
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Home Care Boca Delray
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At some point in our lives, many of us will find ourselves caring for a loved one. According to survey statistics, more than sixty-five million people in the United States provide care, and this number will only continue to increase as the elderly live longer and more people live with chronic illnesses. Most of us took on this role because of our desire to care for our loved one, and, of course, we want to do the best job we can.
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Susan Landeis (Optimal Caregiving: A guide for managing senior health and well-being)
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I’ve heard a lot about robot caregivers, and I know they’re in development all over the place, from MIT to Japan, and to the extent that some of those robots can help minimize injuries, particularly in lifting and transporting the elderly, I see them as an important supplement to what caretakers do,” Poo says. “But I don’t see them as a replacement for people. Too often, technology ends up being about convenience rather than quality of life. And we overmedicalize elder care when what’s really needed is human touch and a more humane set of solutions and choices.
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Andy Stern (Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream)
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It's not a matter of whether or not every employer will feel the impact of caregiving/work balance conflicts, it's a matter of how effectively each employer deals with those conflicts.
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John Paul Marosy (Caregivers Work: A Six Step Guide to Balancing Work and Family: Elder Care Edition (Caregivers Work Series Book 1))