What I’m thinking about
Not long ago, I came across the concept of a “caregiving trajectory” in an academic report from the National Academy of Sciences called Families Caring for an Aging America. The concept is really simple, but really simple concepts can be really helpful.
Here is a short description of "caregiving trajectories” from the report:
The diversity of families, the timing of entry into the caregiving role, the duration of the role in relation to the overall life course of the caregiver, and transitions in care experienced over time all shape the nature of the caregiving role. [“Caregiving trajectories”] highlight the dynamic nature of the role.
And here is an example caregiving trajectory for dementia, which the authors note may be more linear than for illnesses like early-stage cancer or heart disease.
This graphic made it easy to imagine my own caregiving story as a trajectory: My ‘Awareness’ phase simmered for years, while my ‘Unfolding Responsibility’ phase was more of a quick shock after I moved home to be closer to my mom. I’m squarely in the extended ‘Increasing Care Demands’ phase now, always waiting for an email or phone call to tell me the ‘End-of-Life’ phase has begun.
I often ask the people who I work with through my business to imagine their caregiving story with a beginning, a middle, and an end – but I like this framework even more.
Talk soon,
Libby
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An American Family, Ippōsai Yoshifuji, 1861 (The Metropolitan Museum)
What I’m reading this week
One Good Resource
Stitch is a social community for people who are at least 50 years old. Your parents (or you) can join stitch for free – but you can also unlock more functionality with membership fees that range between $60 and $180 per year. Stitch goes out of its way to describe that it is not a dating site – although it seems like this may be a popular goal among the people who use its software and attend its in-person meetups. They have members all over the world, but they say that their largest communities are in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
One Good Quote
“In his interviews with me, Bruce Springsteen was entirely open about the way that his troubled relationship with his father, Doug, had shaped his life and work. He quoted T Bone Burnett’s line that rock and roll is, often enough, a prolonged scream of ‘Daaaaddy!’—a son’s cry for notice. Doug Springsteen was a deeply troubled, withdrawn, and depressed man, someone who was barely capable of holding a job or a conversation. And yet Springsteen needed to have a conversation with his father, and so he did it largely through his songs. Toward the end of his life, buoyed by medicine and a certain easing toward the people around him, Doug grew a little closer to his son. When he was asked which of Bruce’s songs he liked best, he always said, ‘The ones about me.’”
From “Fathers and Sons” by David Remnick in The New Yorker
One Good Book
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama
One theme of this newsletter is that the relationship you have with your parents as a daughter or a son has a big impact on your caregiving role. So I will often share things that are about those family relationships – and not so much about caregiving – as a way of giving you more ways to think and talk about them. This is one of those things.
I read Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father – which he wrote early in his legal career before he first held political office – right after I moved home to care for my mom. There was a lot I didn’t know yet, but I felt certain that choosing to move home unexpectedly in my mid-twenties was going to affect my future, and I found Obama’s thoughtful, thorough exploration of his relationship with his parents – from the point-of-view of his mid-twenties – to be really soothing.
One Good Ad
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Are you worried about your parents? I want to help. Through my business, Quilt, I offer a new kind of online support for people who care for their aging parents that includes phone or video check-ins & unlimited support over email.
An American Family with a Dancing Daughter, Utagawa Yoshikazu, 1861 (The Metropolitan Museum)
One More Thing
Bruce Springsteen’s troubled relationship with his father – which was referenced in the One Good Quote section above – is the focus of several E Street songs, but my favorite one happens to be titled, “Independence Day.”
This weekend was our Independence Day holiday in the United States, so I thought it might make a nice closing note for this issue of the newsletter – even though it’s about a different kind of independence altogether.
Here’s an excellent live version from a performance in Houston, TX, in 1978: