Caring for a Parent in my Home

Caring for a Parent in my Home

Content type: Health story

This article describes Beth’s caregiving story as she cares for her elderly mother post-stroke. Beth’s journey captures the complexities, sacrifices, and resilience inherent in caregiving roles. The narrative explores familial dynamics, emotional strains, and the importance of planning and seeking external support. Beth’s evolving experience offers valuable lessons for educators seeking to illustrate the intersection of health, family dynamics, and personal well-being in caregiving narratives. Caregiver.com aims to provide community and support for nontraditional caregivers, such as children caring for their aging parents. As such, the story emphasizes the significance of communication, planning, and self-care.

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The Mustache

The Mustache

Content type: Health story

This short story follows a teenager straddling the precarious line between adolescence and adulthood, Mike, as he visits his grandmother in an assisted living facility. He discovers that she thinks he is her late husband when she tries desperately to get him to forgive her for a past wrong, while Mike is bewildered at such a raw view of someone he previously only thought of as a distant relation, not her own person. This would be useful for a class discussion on dementia and its effects on family members, as well as the residential care industry itself. It might be a particularly important resource for training healthcare workers to work with the elderly in these kinds of facilities to better understand nuanced experiences of both those who live there and those who visit. Courses on aging more generally could also easily incorporate this as a prompt for discussion or writing reflections.

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