Help! Aging Parents: nostalgia

Showing posts with label nostalgia. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

AGING PARENTS: SELLING PARENTS' HOME

There’s going to be a moving/estate sale this weekend. 70+ years of things to go through and clean out. People running the sale come tomorrow. It feels like the locusts are going to descend and I need to take anything of value–sentimental or otherwise–to a safe place......

.........My brother had the good sense to leave town a few days ago, leaving me to go through everything by myself. Exhausting but also a way to have an intimate kind of closure. A cousin offered to help, but I liked sifting through things and stopping to read this or smile at that–without interruptions...

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Monday, February 3, 2014

Aging Parents/Childhood: My Parents' Home--The Long Farewell

NO GIRLS ALLOWED sign in front of boy's clubhouse--
decades before Woman's Lib.

The young girl is now a well-recognized low vision specialist.

How many of us have had the bittersweet experience of being back on the street where we lived, in the bedroom of our growing up, years after our parents have died? Our street was a micro world--kids about the same age who, when very young, built summer huts of tall weeds on a vacant lot near the end of the street. Before adolescence our early "architecture" morphed into the boys'-built clubhouse in a neighbor's back yard. It had the requisite "NO GIRLS ALLOWED" sign.

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Tuesday, August 30, 2011

A Fun Evening Outing for Aging Parents and You

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About This Blog

Helping parents age well sounds so basic, but it doesn't happen automatically. While we train for the important parts of our lives (childbirth, driving, SATs, jobs), helping parents age well throughout the life cycle is usually on-the-job training--after a health event necessitates fast-forward learning.

Help! Aging Parents is committed to sharing the best information, professional advice, personal experiences and creative ideas to help parents and grandparents age as independently and well as possible until the very end.

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As my parents aged I became aware of a sharp contrast: the ever-present enormous physical and emotional energy of my teenage counselees struggling to develop confidence, assert independence, increase relationships and have fun, while my parents' generation was trying desperately to hold onto these aspects of living.

This led to a disturbing realization: we conscientiously encourage and support younger people who have a full life ahead but--often unwittingly-- diminish and devalue older people. The implications: Younger people feel good about their ability to move forward, while older people can feel "what's the use, I'm old" leading to problems for them and for their children.

This is where we can--and do-- make a difference.