The Great Unlearning: Alzheimer’s
I often hear people say that a person suffering from Alzheimer's is not the person they knew. I wonder to myself - Who are they then? --Bob DeMarco The Present-absence and the long-good-bye of Alzheimer’s disease is heart-breaking. I sat with my once brilliant friend, Frances Gabe, holding her hand and longing for the excursions into the deep end of ideas that we once shared. But that is in the past; to quote Chuck Heston quoting Shakespeare in his statement, they bade farewell
Design Matters: Aging in Place
Design is intelligence made visible. - Alina Wheeler Each year I attend the ASA conference on Aging and reoccurring themes begin to emerge and persist throughout the week; this session remained true to form. One mantra I picked up early; “Design is for all.” Design on the Brain Each of us has a brain equipped with a tightly bundled grouping of nerve cells about the size of an apple wedge located from the top of the spinal cord into the middle of the brain. This part of our brain contains about 70% of its estimated 200 billion nerve
Aging in Place and the Role of Self-Efficacy
“Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment.” -Thomas Carlyle Design with the Future in Mind I was reading an on-going blog series about “Beth,” an active, 89 year old woman lives alone in her one level town home. She has lived alone for many years and has a good support network of family and friends from church. She is relatively healthy but deals with asthma. The post is done by a colleague in the aging in place field, Alesha Churba at Design with the Future in Mind. What Alesha has done is put a human
When Foreclosure Threatens Aging in Place
"A mother can take care of 5 children yet 5 children can't take care of one mother." -unknown I came across the film Make Way For Tomorrow (1937) by Leo McCarey. The movie is about an elderly couple, Barkley (Victor Moore) and Lucy (Beulah Bondi) Cooper, who are forced to separate when they lose their house to foreclosure; and none of their five children is willing to take both parents in. Barkley is not able to find work due to his advanced years and with foreclosure eminent the elderly couple summons the adult children to break
The 7 Habits Applied to Aging in Place
“Every human has four endowments- self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change.” -Stephen R. Covey Stephen Covey’s seminal work on how to create a better human species titled “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” was first published in 1989 and has sold over 15 million copies in 38 languages since first its release. The concepts are timeless and can be broadly applied as I have done here with aging in place. What follows is The