This Monday and Tuesday I attended a wake and funeral for a forty-four-year-old friend, I had not met before, who ended his life. I was present to support the surviving members of the family, to pray for the deceased, and to pray for my contemporaries, in mid-life, who are struggling with personal pain and unremitting […]
A commercial from Hillary Clinton’s campaign states that the American Presidency is the toughest job in the world. I respectfully disagree. The President has work hours, a salary, health benefits, and vacation time. 24/7 Family dementia caregivers do not have these job benefits. I would love to hear the 2016 presidential candidates speak on the […]
A person with disabilities of my own, I was grateful to make it down to the Boston Common for the ADA25Boston Celebration yesterday, thanks to Edith, my beloved get-it-done/personal-care assistant and companion, who drove us down from our home in the Topsfield wilderness. Edith helped us get to the start of the march, at the […]
This is the second in a series of two posts. 1st post in this series: Robin Hood Redux: MAP Conference 2015: About 80% of long-term-care services in the USA are provided by (often unpaid) family caregivers. Many in this population do not have access to the latest and greatest conference presentations due to barriers financial, […]
Today we have completed nine of eighteen 3-hour organizing sessions in this “Paper Layers Excavation” project phase of my larger “Harmony at Home” estate-management program started January 15 of this year (2014). Last week we joyfully reached a project milestone that involved home personal paper files (personal interests, letters, family photos, 2012 wedding vendor contracts, […]
Using a kitchen table for active sorting, and two futons for category classification (work and home), the paper-trail-of-tears began to tell its story. As is a common outcome of taking-time-for-review, I saw with a new appreciation and overview the many help-the-caregivers-services I piloted over four years. I took the time to group the service-related paperwork […]
Please bear with me as I focus on the topic: organizational development. For the last seven years I have chosen not to earn a generous salary as a user-experience design consultant for big businesses in the Boston area. Since 2010, I’ve become an unpaid founder and CEO of this social enterprise, Marymac Missions, which is […]
“Paper Layers” is the second phase of the larger “Harmony at Home” project (started in January 2014 in response to the contents of my family home being moved to my current home). For now, we’ve shut the door on the material goods, and we are focusing only on papers. I had a thirty-day respite in […]
A friend at church on Sunday asked me how I was doing. She asked how my aunt was doing (her husband passed in September). I shared the yang (many positives and energizers) and the yin (the negatives and energy-sappers). The biggest yin at this time is the estate-management project that feels unending… like rowing the […]
My father’s one-year death anniversary came (5/24) and went with me still deep in the trenches of estate-management. I was grateful that a friend mentioned a local workshop on the topic, “Writing Your Grief and Loss.” It seemed a perfect event for me given that the one-year anniversary had been a difficult few weeks. I […]
