Alzheimers & Holidays Archives ⋆ Cathy Cress

Reminiscence on Memorial Day- Serve it to Elders Along With Hamburgers

May 26, 2022

What is Reminiscence- It isn’t new-It’s how history was recorded-

Oral storytellers gave us the Odyssey and other valiant tales. Ulysses and Penelope may be coming to your Memorial Day Barbecue this coming weekend.

But storytelling only works if the teller remembers the lines. Family history has to be captured when the older person still remembers. So holiday events are a perfect time to tap into that font before it flickers.

Tips to Capture Elders’s Stories

Here are some tips to use if they want to capture these family tales during Memorial Day weekend with aging parents—a perfect time to do this. If you are gathering at a memorial day barbeque, ask, older family members how they celebrated the holiday that begins supper, when they were young.

Then use empathetic listening.What is empathetic listening? Make all the messages you are giving the older person— tone, how fast you speak, how they are sitting- say, “I want to listen to you

What is Reminiscence-Asking questions that prompt the story

But don’t make judgments. If there are going to record the family tale, do it in a way that doesn’t distract or stop the older person from talking.

Start somewhere. If the elder isn’t going to tell stories on his or her own, start the story.

See if they will follow along.” Did you go to Memorial Day parades when you were a kid or march in one after the war ( pick his war)?” Did your parents have barbecues to start the summer ?”. “What was it like being drafted? Where did you serve?

Music is just next to memory in the brain.

Alive Inside can be used for elders with dementia. So 50’s Rock and Roll, Little Richard, Bill Haley, and if they are older the Four Freshman. Play elder’s music at your event and ask older vets or their wives or widows for stories of the Vietnam War, Korean War, or Iraq.

Two technology tools to help you with Reminiscence for your older client

Story Worth

Story Worth is a legacy-building tool that can help families create a book of memories through weekly easy prompts of questions to ask the older person to create a weekly story about their life resulting in a book after one Year. My daughter gifted it to her Dad and he and the whole family loved the legacy book that was created

Quick Voice Recorder to catch the memory on your phone and used Dictation to transcribe the memories into written word to print.

Check out my Book Handbook of Geriatric Care Management with more tools for legacy building written by David Lindeman Director Of the Center for Technology at UC Berkeley and Julie Menack of 21 st Care Solutions

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What Happens When High Priestess of the Holidays Falls off her Throne?

December 13, 2021

Mothers are the high priestess of the ritual- like Queen Elizabeth without servants.

This sets up a filial crisis as women age. The UK estimated that there are 25 to-do’s women have on the holiday. It takes years to accumulate objects ritual dishes and religious objects used. It takes the left side of your brain executive skills, plans and organize, remember details, does things based on your experience. This eventually leads to a filial crisis and passing the torch.

Holidays are often done on autopilot

Women as they age –recalling all the jobs that must be done year after year get worn down in their assigned role as ” Mothers are the high priestess of the ritual.”

It also takes their IADLs- (Instrumental Activities of Daily Living) meal planning, shopping, plus ambulation. Then add depression – widowhood, loss and you have the challenges of aging in managing these entire titanic rituals mothers are assigned by society. Many times the aging Mom can no longer balance all these plates and the holidays shatter with the crashing ritual dishes.

When Mom Cannot do all the Holiday Preparation a Filial Crisis Occurs

Then the torch has to be passed and an adult child (usually an adult daughter must take over to resolve this filial crisis. This passing the torch is like secession, – Princess Elizabeth taking over for her Dad, King George, (who hated it and had a lifelong stutter) made famous in The King’s Speech who was handed the throne by his brother Edward who quit being king.

WhenMom needs to Pass the Torch-Some Baby Boomers Kids Shocked

Baby boomer-adult children and aging parents are unprepared by their own culture for this new developmental phase of passing the torch. They do not expect it as they did

the nights of the crying newborn or the rebellious teen, and are thrown off balance by the sometimes sudden and usually unexpected loss of their anchoring aging parents, when they find elderly mom is unable to pull off running the holidays Indeed, what must happen in this new developmental phase is that the adult child must evolve beyond the needy child, he or she has been, depending on his or her parents for that fiscal, emotional, social support and ritual organizing parents, like managing the officiating over the Christmas or Hanukkah celebration and take on filial responsibility to avoid a filial crisis.

Geriatric Care Manager to the Rescue

In the normal healthy family system this filial crisis of Holiday rituals can be overcome and the adult children with the brief help of an aging life or geriatric care manager they can let go of their former dependent roles and confront their parent’s loss by organizing and providing care. They can take over Christmas and Hanukkah by stepping in and grabbing that torch.

Geriatric care managers understand that the adult child must transition to what social work pioneer Margaret Blenkner labeled the filial crisis to filial maturity or a new mature state where they, as midlife adults, can give up their former roles as dependent, needy children and start to provide care to their old/old parents.

Dysfunctional Family Do Not Want to Take Over for Mom

In the dysfunctional aging family, this filial crisis is incredibly hard to trounce from both the parents’ and the adult child’s point of view. They really need a geriatric care manager’s services

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Can Blue Blue Christmas and Hanukkah Come From Dementia ?

December 2, 2020

As Elvis Predicted

Many families have a Blue Blue Christmas-or Hanukkah. Why does an aging crisis occur so often during the holidays? How can so many desperate adult children get care managers on the phone and howl about Mom or Dad in December? There are a million bad reasons, – too much alcohol, too many folks who do not get along and drink that alcohol. But the physical basis for all of this misery in an elder is often a loss of executive function and IADL’s and ADL’s

Why ADL’s and IADL’s.

It takes IADLs- (Instrumental Activities of Daily Living) shopping for gifts, cooking ritual meals and ADL’s walking to shopping

, decorate serve a ritual meal, climbing ( getting all those decorations out of the attic), grooming ( Mom can be found – in a “messy ensemble” at the feast) by the older person in charge of the holiday to pull it off. Then add depression to the aging stew – widowhood, loneliness and you have the challenges to an elder, usually the woman in the family, in managing this entire titanic ritual.

Crash of Executive Skills

The holidays in aging families can be a disaster for another neurological reason. Mom or Dad’s Executive Skills have crashed just like a computer.

Executive functioning involves the ability to organize, plan, and carry out a set of tasks in an efficient manner. It also includes the ability to self-monitor and control our behaviors and multiple other cognitive functions and to perform the goal-directed behavior. It can be described as high-level thinking skills that control and direct lower levels of cognitive functioning.

Planning for the holidays takes those high-level thinking skills -to execute and carry out 25 different major tasks according to a study in the UK- Just think, planning a

specific holiday ritual menu,( brisket and latkes or popovers and beef prime rib )- then shopping for it cooking it, planning the ritual items in the celebration – a menorah and

Hanukkah bush, Christmas tree, and creche buying them or getting them out of storage on and on.

Why we may end up with burned brisket or turkey.

This is a massive task event/ planning job taken on by one woman usually and as executive functioning power down in her brain- the computer-, which is our aging brain starts to crash- the result- the family freaks out because Mom forgot the ritual steps.

That’s why we need aging life or geriatric care managers to help divide the tasks when Mom cannot do this any longer

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