Tag Archives: Health

What Not to Say When Someone’s Relative Is Going Into Long Term Care

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Public Domain-Images of Aging by Administratino on Aging (AOA)

Public Domain-Images of Aging by Administratino on Aging (AOA)

I haven’t accumulated a lot of material riches in my life. One area, though, where there have been substantial deposits into my account, has been that of the learning amassed from some very difficult and painful experiences. I expect this account to keep on growing and earning interest with time, because I want to keep on growing and learning till the end of my life.  I know that life will bring more challenges to handle.  That is the way of the world, but I hope what I learn can continue to help me be more sensitive and more responsive to others who are moving through struggles of their own.

One of the big deposits in my learning bank account, has been a valuable one that I draw from often in my personal and professional interactions. I have learned over time, though experience and through my astonishment at times over the insensitivity of others, what not to say to other people.

In the past I have written articles and posts on Twitter and Facebook about what not to say to those who are grieving and who have lost a loved one. A couple of examples of unhelpful things people say are, “He is better off”, or ” Don’t be sad because she is no longer suffering”, or “You are young. You will find somebody else”, or “Thank goodness you have three other children who are still living”, or “I know exactly how you feel”. These are not helpful things to say to someone in grief.

During my long career in adoption work, and as an adoptive parent, there were also many misspeaks by well-meaning, but ignorant folks. Most adoptive families have heard such comments (often in front of the kids) as, “Too bad you couldn’t have any of your own!”, or “Which ones are your own?”, or “What a wonderful thing you have done”, or “Why didn’t his birth mother want him?”, or “How much did she cost?”.

Now that my husband and I are doing an intensive search in our area for a long term care facility for his mother, I have been hearing from others in the past days who are aware of our situation.

My mother-in-law suffers from dementia which has been advancing lately. We moved her out of house, into an apartment in Pennsylvania where she had lived all of her life, then into an assisted living there. For the past 2.5 years she has resided in a dementia care program of an assisted living facility just a few miles from our home. The care she has received has been very good and we wish she could remain there, but Connecticut does not cover such facilities under Medicaid. She is nearly out of funds.  This means that we must find an acceptable long term care facility nearby, but they all seem to have waiting lists now. Medicaid won’t approve the application until she is actually placed in a facility. Meanwhile her assets need to be down to a very small amount in order for her to be approved for Medicaid funding. If she is placed immediately, her assets will be down to zero in no time flat because the cost of a long term care facility is more than double what her care costs are now.  The facilities are more inclined to accept somebody with some money left since the State is so backlogged with applications and the facility might possibly not receive approval (or reinbursement for care) for a good year or longer. The facilities on whose waiting lists we have put her (with extensive applications needed for each one) want proof that she has a valid pending application for Medicaid. The Catch 22 is that she is still a little over-asset and is not yet physically in a facility, so they closed the application and it has to be resubmitted with the extensive documentation.

So, we are getting increasingly more frustrated and scrambling more to figure out a plan.

Enter the well-meaning people who have said or written to me in the past week or two. I keep hearing things like, “I would never place my mother in a nursing home.”, and “Surely she deserves better than that”, and “My father would never want to go into a home”, and “Why can’t you just care for her in your home?”.

These comments are now safely tucked away in my account of what not to say, and added to the learning to be used in the future.

We love my mother-in-law, who was a sweet person and was always extemely concerned about her sons and the rest of her family. She is no longer this person.  She has mostly lost the ability to walk and is fearful of standing at all. She speaks mostly in word-salad and doesn’t make sense the majority of the time. Though she recognizes my husband and me, she doesn’t recognize others who care for her every day. She doesn’t know where she is or remember the dining room where she goes three times a day.  She is highly anxious and often shrieks and cries. She is completely incontinent now. She does still eat by herself, but chokes often, and she can’t dress or bathe herself. She needs a calm, quiet environment and needs to be reassured regularly, with someone sitting with her as much as possible in order to help keep her calm.   Visiting her is getting harder and harder emotionally, but of course, we do it as often as possible. It is near impossible not to be heartbroken remembering how someone we love used to be and is no longer. It’s hard when we reach a certain age and begin to see what could possibly happen to us, though of course we all pray it won’t.

In addition to all of this, we have a young daughter and granddaughter already residing with us, and stress from other quarters (who doesn’t?).

I work from a home office and have been an in-person and long-distance caregiver for multiple family members, starting in my 30′s many years ago.  Maybe to some, these seem like rationalizations, but the well-meaners don’t walk in our shoes and we know that there is no way we could, or even should consider having my mother-in-law live with us in our home.

So, please, if you know someone going through this, or any other difficult life change/loss, please think before you speak. Please don’t insert your own judgments and opinions into the mix unless asked. Please be there to listen, to validate, to console, to help if you have a concrete way to help. Just don’t assume that what you think is right or is the only way. Be aware that what you say may be hurtful and may add to the stress someone is already feeling.

Is There An App for Decluttering Your Life?

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      I wish there were an app to simplify and make less painful, the cleaning out of all the clutter (and crap) that accumulates in our homes over the years. Some of the clutter has real meaning for us, which  makes it a formidable task to take care of, but I wonder more and more these days about the benefits of having so much “stuff”.

      I wish there were a way to just hit delete and to have some cyber-genie make the decisions and do all the work, sifting and sorting through the possessions that are beginning to bog me down, that call forth memories of wonderful and terrible times. It would be terrific to simply move my delete finger  without brain involvement and not have to make tough decisions that may not be immediately necessary, but that will be one day, if history repeats itself as it tends to do.

     I helped my mother “downsize” four times. She and my father moved from the house where I (mostly) grew up in Brooklyn, NY, to an apartment in Sheepshead Bay, and then after my father’s death, to senior housing in the CT town where I live.  It didn’t seem possible to compress her life and history any more than had already been done by the great figurative trash compacter of aging, but when she  moved into a nursing home for the final nine months of her life, I agonized over the allocation of what was left.  

     I certainly am not saying that my mother’s life amounted to a trash heap of junk. Each and every piece of furniture, doily, dish towel, figurine, dog-eared photo, ugly lampshade, card, letter, book, and dish was a treasure to her. Each represented a life in which I truly had a bit part, a walk-on, really, in comparision to the years lived before I blinked into the sunlight one day at Brooklyn Doctor’s Hospital.  I am not saying that I was not important in her life. Naturally I was, but so many others were too. She had a life of thirty-five years before I made it into the world.  I did not live inside of her head either.  I could not possibly have understood her unique memories and the attachments she had to her own things. Even when we share certain memories with another person, the ways in which those memories become recorded in our brains and etched on our hearts have to do with how we personally perceive life.  

     The items that triggered some type of memory for me and had meaning in my own version of our family experience, I held onto. Some things I foisted off on anyone in the family who had even the slightest interest, and they also chose what was useful to them.  The rest I gave away or even discarded, with no small measure of sadness.

     Years later (yesterday was the eleventh anniversary of my mother’s death) my husband and I went through a similar experience with my mother-in-law. We conducted what almost amounted to an archeological dig though her house in Pennsylvania. She was definitely a horder, so there was a lot to go through.  In her attic, we even found pay stubs from her very first job.  We unearthed an abundance of school papers and drawings done by her two adult sons.  There were personal items that should have been discarded forty years earlier (believe me, you don’t want details). We found toys, old religious artifacts belonging to her parents, more photos of few people we recognized, and furniture that was her mother’s, but was too beat up to have much monetary value.  We discovered bags and boxes of clothing that had traveled the roads of weight gain, weight loss and renewed weight gain. There were unopened cartons of things ordered from catalogues, tucked away and never used, as her life became more and more isolated.

     We helped Bernice move to an apartment in a senior complex. She lived there for about four years and when she became less and less able to function on her own, we moved her two floors down to an  assisted living unit in the same complex in Chester, PA.   After a little more than a year there, her health and mental status further declined, so we once again downsized.  We circulated her worldy goods among those who wanted them, sold some and moved a few meaningful items into her small, cozy room at an assisted living facility  for those with dementia, near our home in CT.  My husband claimed the objects that meant something to him. We also ended up with a few pieces of furniture that were too new to discard and that nobody else had room for.

     Some pieces of crystal joined the collection from my mother,  from my late sister, my grandmother and my sister’s mother-in-law. They sit, mostly gathering dust, on my dining room mantel.  A couple of times a year I  tend to them, washing them in dish liquid and trying to remember which piece belonged to whom.  The bud vases my mother collected on their travels to Europe after my father retired, are in her curio cabinet in my upstairs family room. My aunt, the baby in their family of origin, was to have been the recipient of the vases, having greatly admired them, though they aren’t worth much. She died about nine months before my mother did.  I have earrings that were my aunt’s, along with various pieces, mainly costume jewelry, that belonged to my mother and my sister. Again, little of it is worth money, but I am now the repository of all of the collective memories connected to these things.

     I have several bookcases filled with books that were primarily my  father’s  He treasured them. I have books of my mother’s too and of one uncle. There are only a couple of rooms in our house that don’t have bookshelves and all of them are full.  I have my late brother’s photo album from his days at Parris Island when he was in Boot Camp in the Marines. I have pictures he painted before he gave up his art and music and became a family man who thought (sadly) that he needed to put his talents and passions away for eternity. On our walls are awards my sister won at her job and in her volunteer work with the Jewish War Veterans. I have (tucked on a shelf in a plastic bag somewhere) a cap, one of many exactly the same, worn by my father at work, from the time he was sixteen to the time he retired.  Boxes and boxes of photos of people in old-fashioned garb are stashed in various closets.  The photos are full of faces nobody remaining in our family recognizes.  A large plastic container of vinyl records sits in a spare bedroom. They are of opera, jazz, pop, folk music and are not in good enough condition to sell,  but  I keep hanging on to them, till the day I have the heart to discard them.  I also have part of a downstairs closet filled with metal boxes of my father’s slides. I would love to find time to view them, or even better, to transfer them to disks or save them on the computer “some day”.

     Then there are the things I have left from my first husband who died in his thirties. I have a box with the tie he wore at our wedding and letters he wrote to me. Maybe my kids will want them one day, but then again, maybe they won’t. These are stashed In our very crowded attic.  I believe there is an old cricket bat of his, as well as family trinkets from his New England clan that can trace their ancestry back many generations.

     I have lived in my current house for thirty-three years now. I have done a fair amount of traveling, so naturally, I have my own “treasures” that evoke memories of those trips and the people I was fortunate enough to meet. I have photos and art from various countries, and then there are my own collections that represent my personal interests and obsessions, depending on which person you ask.  There are paintings, posters, ceramic figures, postcards, greeting cards, mugs, garlands and wall hangings portraying my family’s favorite, canine, the diehard Scottish Terrier, as well as photos of our own Scotties. There are cardboard cartons of papers, and notebooks filled with my own poetry and other writing (before the days of computer archives).

    

       Then there are the toys and books belonging to my four kids who have no place to store them. Now that my youngest and her daughter live with us, we also have boxes of Gabby’s outgrown clothes and her toys grace a few rooms in our house.

     Lest you think I am a hoarder like my mother-in-law was, I can assure you that I have a good-sized home, a bit  cluttered by some standards, but not unbearable, and not anything you might see on a TV show about people who can no longer function, due to the disastrous mess that surrounds them. Ours is a very old house, so  it lends itself easily to being filled with momentoes, rather than with simple, sleek, modern furniture and open space.

     I do like my things and can literally walk around my home and see an imaginary slide show of all of the lives that are represented by the “stuff” around me.  Sometimes looking at these things evokes smiles and sometimes some tears, but mostly I don’t have time to dwell on them because I am too busy. They get dusted periodically and then I permit myself a moment of connection with them, calling up names, faces, places and feelings.

     Now that I am at the age some consider “retirement age”, though that is not really on my agenda, it makes sense that I am beginning to wonder what will happen to the generations of possessions that surround me each day.  None of us like think about the negative aspects of aging.  Most prefer to deny our chronological advancing as much as we can and to focus on our experience and wisdom, or our fantasies that we possess them.   A few of us are  fortunate and can remain in our homes and care for ourselves, but most of us ultimately will require some help, will choose to downsize our living quarters, or will have this chosen for us, due to circumstances.

     Long ago, after we moved back into our home following a fire and the terrible tragedy of my first husband’s death in that fire, I vowed to never again take for granted my home and the things I was lucky enough to have in my life once more.  Most of what we had was destroyed or damaged in the fire.  I have never forgotten my vow to myself. Part of my routine on an almost daily basis, is to make sure I notice things in my surroundings and appreciate and take pleasure in them.

     In the end though, I recognize that many or most of the material acquisitions that belong to me and that belonged to multiple people before me, will end up being tossed to the four winds, or possibly at the thrift shop, or in the garbage dumpster. I am sure my adult kids and grandkids will choose to keep certain objects, but they will be faced with an even more imposing job than I faced, simply due to the fact that I have outlasted the members of my family of origin.

     I imagine that when one of my kids picks up an antique book of maps given me by a dear friend during one of my trips to India, or finds a bent and tarnished silver baby cup from one of my first husband’s ancestors, there will be some fleeting interest. I am sure that when someone comes across old love letters, or sets of leather-bound books my father purchased with great pride on time payments in the 1930′s, there may even be some animated discussion among my survivors. My suspicion  is though, based on my own experiences, that life will move forward and most of what simultaneously enriches and confines my world in the present, will be clutter that isn ‘t particularly needed or wanted, beyond a few miscellaneous treasures. This seems a reasonable forecast of the future.

    I intend to continue reminding myself to take pleasure in my surroundings and that means enjoying some of the special posessions in my midst, but it is clearly time in the life cycle to begin to at least think about who will want what and to get rid of some things.  It’s definitely time to stop acquiring a lot more.  I may give in to temptation on occasion, but I need to think twice about new purchases.  Did I really need those two  1800′s cobalt pottery pitchers made in a town where we used to live?  Do I really need another Scottish Terrier statue? I hope to still be around for a lot of years, but I am going to make a pledge to actively begin the grueling task of decluttering before too much more time has passed.

     The most important thing, I think, is to begin to “download” the events and remembrances I absolutely want to leave for posterity . There are family anecdotes, values and learning that may die with me, and these are the true gifts I want to leave for my kids and grandchildren.  I don’t believe I am a terribly materialistic sort, but in the next decade I want to focus a  lot less on the wordly goods in my little dominion and a whole lot more on decluttering.  It’s not going to be easy, but I am starting to feel the need for more visual and physical space. Clearing out some seems to help me do what is  more crucial to me than ever, which is to reflect, create and positively interact with others. It’s impossible to interact with a Chinese vase, don’t you think?

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     Speaking of clutter, one kind of “clutter” I welcome is a batch of comments, so how about taking a minute or two to comment directly on my blog at www.coachirisblogs or on on Facebook, if that is where you first accessed this.  Did you like this post at all? Did you disagree with it? Did you relate to it in any way?  Let’s hear from you, please. Subscribe to this blog if you enjoyed this post, or explore older ones. Also watch for the launch of a couple of my new web sites and take a few moments to visit one that’s up and running at  www.meetcoachiris.com .

When You Want to Curl Up in a Corner and Rock Away the Stress

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If you are going through some tough times and are feeling very stressed for multiple reasons, you may wake up some mornings and, try as you might, have a hard time facing a new day. You know that for you, this is generally not a feeling that lasts and what you feel does seem to be rational depression, in that there are things going on in your world that are primarily beyond your own control, but that are making you feel worried, sad and anxious. You know from past experience that you possess some tools to help you out of the hole, but with all that is going on in your life, lately it just feels more and more difficult to make a search for that figurative ladder hiding in the bushes that you can drag close and use to climb out of the deep, dark pit.

Have you had days like that? Have you ever awakened and thought to yourself, “This is the worst time I have ever gone through”?  I know I have, but then I mull it over some more  and remember (though sometimes I don’t really want to) that as bad as whatever it is feels now, I have lived  through times that were equally as bad, or even worse.  During those earlier bleak times it seemed that things would never get better and that I might never feel joy again.  I was always wrong.

I had a client once, who compared every bad occurrence or bump in her life’s road to “dead baby”. She she had been through such a horrible loss and survived it, though the pain will always be with her, but in what seemed to me at the time like a strange way of coping, she used that shock and awareness she made herself feel, to help her get through whatever difficulties were happening in the present. This was how she reminded herself that she was a strong woman. It worked for her! I am a huge advocate of doing whatever works for you, as long as others are not hurt in the process, and as long as in making your choices, you are not doing something that simply feels good for the moment, but has the potential to cause you longer term harm.

I know what it’s like to  feel as though life could not possibly throw one more horrendous thing at you. It feels like you will explode if you have to cope with anything more than is overflowing your already full bowl.  I know there are folks who believe that God only gives us what we can handle. I don’t know what I think on that score but if it’s true, He or She  must consider me a veritable rock. Sometimes I surprise myself by feeling that I am indeed a rock, albeit a wobbly one, not always on level ground, and I marvel at my ability to summon up courage and strength in times of adversity.  At other times, I just want to curl up in a  very dark corner and shut out reality, at least for a day or two. I think most of us feel that way sometimes.

Sometimes nothing we do works at reducing our stress, no matter what we try.  When our worry, anxiety and sadness prevail, it is a good idea to seek professional help.  However, when these responses are caused by real-life situations that  hit us all at once, such as being in the Sandwich Generation and worrying about serious issues our children and parents are facing, or any other combination of very real, painful, worrysome problems, there is no magic pill that is just going to make everything get better or disappear. That doesn’t  mean, though, that we can’t get some help, because we certainly can.  It disturbs me that some doctors are so quick to pull out the prescription pad and offer a chemical solution without knowing all of the facts, or even what the individual’s coping techniques are and have been historically. Remember that it is not the stress itself that causes our defenses to break down and makes us feel bad, but how we handle it.  We can definitely learn more effective methods of relaxation and can find outlets and activities that help us unwind and help us cope better. 

If you are somebody like me and have a long, cumulative history of stress and hardships (and a lot of us do) and also a history of being a perpetual caretaker, always there for others, always needed and always ready to the best of your ability to step up and help, maybe it is time to stop and take some breaths.  Maybe it’s a good time to re-think your next course of action and take stock of what tools and help you have available for yourself.  I hope you can do this before you go on depleting all of your resources so that you are not of any use to yourself, or to anyone else you care about.

We know that repeated and prolonged stress takes a terrible toll on us. We know that chronic stress can diminish our immune systems and can affect all of our bodily organs.  It can make us more vulnerable to a variety of infections and conditions.  It can zap our energy and our creativity if it has gone on for a long while, though in small doses can spur us on to change and growth.

Still, even with the best help and with the most superior tools and resources we can put into place, there will be some days when we really do want to curl up in a corner and self-soothe. Is this so awful if it is not something we do often?   Maybe we don’t need to be strong and giving all of the time? Maybe part of our journey is learning how to allow ourselves to retreat and even to lick our wounds once in a while and just shut out the world for a bit.  Maybe we need more practice in calming and comforting ourselves, rather than relying on external measures to carry us to a more healthy place.  It is considered a good thing to teach infants to self-soothe when they are anxious or irritable,because eventually they must separate emotionally and physically from their maternal figures. The  world can be an unsettling place if they don’t have the ability to calm themselves and to get a little respite from the over-stimulation of their environment.  Neglected infants engage in too-much self-soothing, because that is all they can rely on.  I don’t recommend that we retreat into behaviors like that, but a healthy amount of curling up and pulling in may be just what we need some days.

NEED MORE TIPS TO MANAGE CARE OF PERSON WITH DEMENTIA?

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     If you are a Sandwich Generationer, as am I, do you ever wake up in the morning and wonder what the next crisis will be? Will you have a calm, happy and productive day today? , Will there be a call from one of your offspring with a freshly minted dilemma awaiting your wise counsel, expert trouble-shooting abilities and possibly a contribution from your wallet? Will you get a call from your elderly parent at the care facility, or even from the staff, informing you of a new event, or of a brand new symptom or issue needing your immediate attention? As the day progresses, will you slowly begin to feel stressed and compressed as though you were being flattened in a panini maker?

    It does get discouraging and draining sometimes, doesn’t it?

    Yesterday my husband and I got a call from his brother in another state (from which we recently relocated my mother-in-law to a dementia care facility near us).  His brother, Ed,  had called their mother and was informed by her that my husband had not been to see her for 2 whole weeks. My brother-in-law was disturbed by this but I let him know that we definitely go to see her at least a couple of times a week, either together or separately, and sometimes we bring other family members.   This morning, my husband had the day off and picked up his mother to transport her to a dentist appointment. He found her extremely agitated, crying and saying she had thought he was dead, hadn’t been there in weeks, etc.   She said she had been so worried.  I got a similar story from her when I visited her with our baby granddaughter last Wednesday afternoon. She reported then too,  that she had not seen my husband for weeks. I told her he had been there only a couple of days before and she seemed satisfied, until the following day when he visited and got the same complaints and tears. She calmed down, seemed to enjoy his visit, but Friday, she called me and complained anew that she hadn’t seen him in ages.  I gave her the facts but did not engage in an argument, which is pointless. She seemed satisfied that I was telling her the truth, though that is not always the case with dementia patients.  I informed her that my husband would be working long hours all weekend at the hospital and that I would try to stop by if able.

     Obviously, whatever we have been doing isn’t working and my husband found it extremely draining to have to keep telling her that he had not been absent for weeks, while getting her to calm down.

     One thing that worked with my mother years ago, might be adapted for use with my mother-in-law, or perhaps with your own elderly loved one.  My mother frequently called me and was irate that her aides would not help her go to the bathroom. She often demanded that I get in the car and assist her immediately. The facility was located just down the street from our house (also my work place) and that was something she remembered, though she forgot many other things.   My protests that I could not interrupt my work day did not help. Often the aides would tell her that they had just taken her to the bathroom five minutes before. My mother was insistent that they were lying.  So we got a dry erase board, put it up in a conspicuous spot near her chair and bed and had the caregivers write the day and time they took her to the bathroom. We requested that they point  out to my mother as they were writing, reminding her that “Today is Monday and I am taking you now, at 1:15 PM”.   We asked them to keep a running list each day and when my mother asked to go again only a short while after the first trip, to just matter-of-factly point to the time they had  written down. We requested that they not contradict or argue with her. We then informed my mother how this would work and told her that the main purpose was for us to be able to be reassured that they were not neglecting her needs and for us to review how often they took her for toileting. She seemed pleased and it worked. (This of course was after we had ruled out the possibility of a urinary tract infection so that we knew she was not experiencing urgency or other physically-based symptoms). She admitted that she wasn’t sure she had to go but was disturbed “that nobody seemed to want to help her” and she worried she might become incontinent.

     My mother-n-law has more severe memory and cognitive problems than my mother had and is not very oriented to time or often to place.  She is still at the point, though, where she can be reoriented and reassured when it is done kindly and not in an argumentative or accusatory fashion.  So we have come up with the idea of creating a simple chart to post on her bulletin board, either using two different colored stars (One for my husband and one for me) or using different colored markers that we would store in her night table.  We plan to write our names and the day we are visiting, and/or to place a colored star or our names on the chart. (We haven’t worked it all out yet).  This is a suggestion you might want to try, adapting it to your elder’s needs and situation. We don’t know for sure that it will work but I’ll keep you posted if you write me and want to know. We are not going to use her calendar as there isn’t a lot of space in which to write in the boxes and she has to be able to see the stars, colors or names when we point them out to her.

     What adaptations can you come up with to create some type of a reassuring tracker for your family member? What are the typical or recurrent things about which your elder needs regular reminders or reassurance? How can you defuse the issue so that you are not in the position of needing to repeat the very same things over and over, or of getting into an argument over whatever it is?  Is your family member still functional enough to engage in a simple problem-solving session about how, together, you can create a system to help him or her remember? This helps maintain dignity and provides a feeling of some control over a disturbing situation in their eyes. Can you make a couple of suggestions, encourage them to give you some input, listen carefully and actively, mirroring back what they say to be sure you understand and help them feel you do care about their ideas? Even a cognitively impaired, forgetful person with language deficits can come up with something.  It might be difficult to comprehend or not at all workable but will probably make your loved one feel you are trying to hear them out and that you get what bothers them.  Everyone wants to feel you GET THEM!  If your family member is not very communicative, you can come up with simple suggestions and can give them two choices and ask which one they prefer and think will be better.  Again be sure to listen and to validate what they say and what they feel.  If they lack the ability to be very participatory in the process, say something like, “I hear that you worry when you can’t remember if we were here to see you. I am so sorry.   I want to help you remember. Let’s try this…..”

     Anyway, please know that I have been through this before and am presently going through it again with my husband’s mother. It is hard…very hard…tiring, frustrating, worrysome and a host of other things. It is one of the life stage problems I help people with. Coaches don’t give you the answers. We help you find the best solutions within yourselves though sometimes we might help you awaken your own creativity by spurring you on with ideas. We do not, however, impose our own solutions and ideas on you. There are almost always solutions though, or ways to help make things better once you get clear on what it is you need the help with.

     If you would like to contact me with your Sandwich Generation problem or something that is on your mind, let’s have a brief get-to-know each other free session or exchange emails.  Write me at iris@visionpoweredcoaching.com.  Perhaps you might like to learn more about me or to subscribe to my blog at www.visionpoweredcoaching.com.  I am also always interested in the creative things you come up with to help you deal with your own Sandwich Generation issues and/or to improve the quality of life for your elderly relatives.

     You can join my mailing list to be notified about special offers and values at http://www.coachirisoffers.com.  I am a Certified Professional Coach who helps clients with Life Stage, Family and Relationship Changes.  I help with Big Changes, Hard Choices and Second Chances. My specialties are loss and grief and particularly loss issues associated with aging, death of a spouse, or loss of other loved ones.  I am also an adoption specialist and particularly in the areas of loss and grief of infertility, adopted kids and adopted adults, and birth parents who have placed a child for adoption.