Cathy Cress

Expert in Aging Life and Geriatric Care Management

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

May 26, 2022

Reminiscence on Memorial Day

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.

Reminiscence on Memorial Day

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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Filed Under: Aging, Aging Life Care, aging life care manager, Alive Inside, Alzheimers & Holidays, Benefits of Reminiscence, Black RN, Black Travel Nurses, Black Travel RN, Blog, care manager, Dementia & Holidays, Dementia Activities, Families, Geriatric Care Management Business, Geriatric Care Manager, geriatric social worker, Holiday Rituals in Aging Family, Holidays, Legacy Tools, Memoria lDay With Elders, Memorial Day, Memorial Day and Aging Veterans, Memorial Day Barbecue, Memorial Day Veterans, Memorial Day with elders, Memories for Elders, Music and Memory, nurse advocate, nurse care manager, Quality of Life, Quality of Life and Reminicance, Quality of Life Reminiscence, Quality of Life with Dementia, Reminiscence Therapy, Retired Veterans, Senior Legacy, Seniors&Reminiscence, Spoiled Holiday Rituals, Story Worth, Technology for Geriatric Care Managers, Technology for Reminiscence, Technology for seniors Tagged With: aging family, aging life care manager, aging parent care, Alive Inside, black aging family, black american geriatric care managers, black american social workers, Black Entrepreneurs, Black RN's, Black start-up geriatric care management, Black travel nurses, care manager, case manager, geriatric care manager, Memorial Day barbecue. Music and memory, nurse advocate, nurse care manager, oral history, oral history and quality of life, reminicence and elder, Reminicence and geriatric care manager, Reminicence on Memorial Day, Reminicence Therapy, reminiscence, storytelling and elders, StoryWorth

10 Reminiscence Therapy Tools, Technology, and Techniques for New Year

December 29, 2021

 

Use Reminiscence therapy to capture family tales of aging parents or clients in the New Year

Do you use reminiscence therapy? Do you know how to use a reminiscence tool? Have you lost an aging parent and wished you had asked them more questions to reminisce about their past, your family history, and your childhood? Have you dabbled in ancestry and realized -too late- that you should have just listened closely to the stories your parents told you then written them down before they died?

Start Now! Use reminiscence therapy to make this New Year the year you collect the stories in your own family plus assist your aging clients by using 10 reminiscence therapy tools, technology, and techniques.

1. Use empathetic listening. This means to make all the messages you are are giving the older person— tone, how fast you speak, how they are sitting-  all saying, “I want to listen to them.”

2. Use empathetic listening then ask 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.

3. Start somewhere with a question then use empathetic listening. If the elder isn’t going to tell stories on his or her own, start the story and see if they will follow along.”What was a New Years Resolution that you made and kept” ” Do you remember your favorite doll ” What was your first day of school like”

4 . Music is just next to memory in the brain. So you want to use music as a reminiscence tool. This can be done through Alive Inside. So use Alexa, Spotify, to play  40’s 50’s  60’s music or especially when they were teens. Why? Sexual awakening when we are teens and the background music of that time deepens memory when they were teens  –when they were teens  NO Surprise. Simple ways to spark reminiscence when you visit older family members -bring their teenage music on your phone.

5. Use more reminiscence tools. Look at old photos together. Photos trigger memory even with dementia. Choose ones from a period of time the person currently remembers, which could be the person as a young adult, teenager, or even a young child.
6. Play music from their teenage years. That is a powerful reminiscence tool. It is the background to the most emotional period of anyone’s life and deeply lined into memory.
7. Another reminiscence tool is food. Serve food that is a family tradition or specialty, particularly ones that have an element of memory attached from family celebrations. like Mom’s Briscut, Dad’s Sunday Supper lasagna, or “Aunt Helen’s Lemon Cake”.

8. Story Worth was started by Nick Baum, a tecky who was, and in a way, a long-distance care provider for his parents in Sweden. He was curious about their past and invented the app based on his own need to gather his family history through reminiscence therapy in book form. My husband is a teller of past tales as a California Highway patrolman, then Hippiedom, then as top marketing director for Pacific Cookie Company, the best cookies here is the west.

Our daughter Kali gave him Story Worth as a holiday gift 2 years ago. In the first 12 months of the COVID, he recorded 40 stories or memories from his past. They were all published by Story Worth Book, saving in print the precious reminiscence that would have been lost but now saved in a  book that we gave to our adult children for them and generations to come.

This is a gold star reminiscence tool that gives you a brilliant way to capture reminiscence and I  recommend it to adult children who want to enshrine personal memories in print that otherwise would be lost when they reach back for them..

9. Life Bio-  a reminiscence tool,online template of biography and autobiography questions that have been carefully crafted

 

10. Quick Voice Recorder  a reminiscence tool to catch the memory on your phone

Reminiscence in aging is a part of a whole new domain in aging called quality of life or attending to the older person’s need for joy through activities that stimulate the mind. Reminiscence does that- so find out more about how you can increase the quality of life of older people after the holidays and all year long by building a quality of life reminiscence program like Lifespan’s Well Being program in Santa Cruz, Ca.

Filed Under: Aging, Alive Inside, Black Aging Family, Black Entrepreneur, Black Entrepreneur RB, Black Entrepreneur RN, Black entrepreneurs, Black Geriatric Care Manager, Black geriatric care managers, Black RN, Black Travel Nurses, Blog, Geriatric Care Management Business, Geriatric Care Manager, Legacy Tools, Reminiscence Therapy, Senior Legacy, Story Worth Tagged With: aging life care manager, Alive Inside, ancestry, assessing for quality of life, care manager, case manager, empathetic listening, Family stories, geriatric care manager, isolation and quality of life, Music and Memory, nurse advocate, nurse care manager, oral history and quality of life, quality of life Alive Inside, reminicence and elder, Reminicence and geriatric care manager, Reminicence Therapy, reminicsence technology, Reminiscence tool, story telling elders, StoryWorth

8 Ways to Make Reminiscence a Valentine’s Gift for Aging Clients Tomorrow

February 13, 2020

Want a perfect Valentines’s gift for aging clients?

You already have it. A great Valentine’s for your older client is you the care manager, caregiver or family member- using reminiscence to gather an elders’ memories.

Reminiscence isn’t new. Before the printing press, storytellers and bards were how history was recorded-

Oral storytellers gave us the Odyssey and other oral tales. History exists in a family, and Ulysses or Penelope might be sitting in their home on Valentines’ Day- in the form of your aging clients.

But storytelling or reminiscence 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 or dries up.

Capture Reminiscence

Here are some tips to use if you want to capture these family tales during Valentine’s visit with older clients—a perfect time to do this before age or dementia wipe their history.

  1. Give Valentine’s gift each week of the year. Use StoryWorth. My daughter Kali Peterson Murphy, who is also in aging as a Program Officer, with the SCAN Foundation, purchased this as a Holiday gift for my husband and her Dad Pete. I love this as a user and a Geriatric care manager. Each week it prompts Pete to answer a question that my daughter chooses when she purchases StoryWorth. Pete can actually change the questions to be ones he wants to answer. Pete writes the answers and I record them on my iPhone and send them into Story Worth with photos that I have gathered of Pete’s life and stored on Google Photos.( this is an option) At the end of the year, her about to be 79-year-old Dad gets a book with all his stories.

It is a slam dunk for reminiscence. The adult child and or family receive the family history to be passed down, the older family members get to both tell her or his story and know that their family is interested in what they have to share from their past and in the end get a book about their lifeform it a fabulous gift.

Order it from Valentine’s Day tomorrow and you will have a year full of family history, an aging adult who knows you care about listening to them and an incredible gift of a reminiscence book for next Valentines’ Day and the rest of your life that you can pass down.

If you visit Reminiscence Tips

2. First, arrive with a real Valentine card and a small sensory gift like a little chocolate or some fresh red and white flowers. Just the card and the gift evoke memories

3. Use empathetic listening Make all the messages you give the older person— tone, how fast you speak, how they are sitting- say, “I want to listen to you.” This in itself is a gift to an older person as few people really listen to them as they age.

4. Ask questions that prompt the story but don’t make judgments. If there are going to record the family tale,  as on your I phone, do it in a way that doesn’t distract or stop the older person from talking.

5. You might ask the client or the family for some family photos of the older person growing up, getting married, and use those as memory prompts.

6. Start somewhere. If the elder isn’t going to tell stories on his or her own, start the story and see if they will follow along.” Did you go to Valentine’s parties  when you were a kid or celebrate the day in school by exchanging valentines .” Did you have a special valentine as a teenager or young adult?”

7. If the client has dementia you can still do this with reminiscence prompts like a valentine, chocolate, some flowers or a simple valentine decoration you bring.

 

8. Use technology tools to help you with this legacy-building for your older client like Life Bio-    or

Quick Voice Recorder to catch the memory on your phone.

Follow Cathy Jo Cress’s  posts in geriatric care management

 

Filed Under: Adult children, Aging Family, Aging Life Care, aging life care manager, Blog, care manager, case manager, Dementia Activities, elder care manager, geriatric care manager, geriatric social worker, nurse advocate, nurse care manager, Oral History, Quality of Life, Quality of Life for elders, Quality of Life with Dementia, Reminiscence Therapy, Valentines gifts for family caregivers Tagged With: aging family, aging life care manager, aging life or geriatric care manager, care manager, case manager, geriatric care management, nurse advocate, nurse care manager, Reminiscence on the Holidays, reminiscence technology, Reminiscence Therapy, StoryWorth, Valentines Day, Valentines Day Gift for caregivers

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