“You have your lunch, right? “Yes Mom.” “Your swim bag?” “Yes Mom.” “And the guitar is in the car for your lesson later?” I volley at my 10 year old and teen son in the morning rush. “YES, Mom!” They both shout simultaneously. Then out loud, to myself: “Long-term healthcare phone number to find out…
On a recent July afternoon, a group of residents at the Hebrew Home of Riverdale, New York congregated on a shady terrace. They were sitting in a semicircle facing Deborah Michaels, the instructor leading the yoga class. “Okay now we’re going to lift our hands up,” Michaels said. The participants raised their arms, some more…
Donald Sterling’s wife, Shelly Sterling, had him declared mentally unfit after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, enabling her to push through former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s $2 billion offer to buy the Los Angeles Clippers, TMZ reported Friday. The family trust that governs the Sterlings’ ownership of the Clippers basketball team includes a clause that…
Seth Rogen took a trip down to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to testify at a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing titled “The Rising Cost of Alzheimer’s in America.” The actor spoke about how the disease has impacted his own family. (WATCH the livestream here.) The actor and director is a celebrity spokesman and fundraiser for the…
This post is in reply to Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s Forward piece, “Keeping the Conversation Going: A Daughter Speaks to Her Mother Across the Memory Loss Divide.” When I read Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s article about learning to cope with her mother Betty’s memory loss, Betty reminded me so much of my own mother: vibrant, engaging, talkative,…
This post is in reply to Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s Forward piece, “Keeping the Conversation Going: A Daughter Speaks to Her Mother Across the Memory Loss Divide.” The visit to my Dad last week didn’t have an auspicious beginning. For the first time since he entered a nursing home two and a half years ago, he…
When my mother started to lose memories in her 90s, she moved into a residential community near me, in Cambridge, Mass. I had been a cultural critic of age in America, an “age critic,” for decades. But the focus in my books — beginning with “Safe at Last in the Middle Years” — had been…
Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me By Sarah Leavitt Skyhorse Publishing, 128 pages, $14.95 Early on in Sarah Leavitt’s heartbreaking account of her mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease comes what I think of as The Conversation. It’s the moment a family needs but at the same time dreads, when the reality everyone…
100% of profits support our journalism
