aging parents
A New Year & A New Perspective
A New Year & A New Perspective
Dear friends and colleagues in the healing arts,
2015 presented me with some interesting challenges. After the death of my beloved mother and the near death and continued illness of my husband, I wondered how we healers can continue to serve our patients when we ourselves are in the midst of tough times. Maybe some of you have come up against this question too.
What I discovered is, as songwriter Leonard Cohen writes, “The birds they sang at the break of day. Start again I heard them say. Don’t dwell on what has passed away or what is yet to be. Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
It’s this last part that has surprised me. What an unexpected gift is the grace and light that can emerge out of adversity. What I am learned continually deepens both my work and my home life.
As we get older, we find ourselves adding to our toolkit of life skills. Mindfulness tools have reentered my life and work in a big way. And so has my intention to reach a much wider audience through teaching nationally about conscious aging. The need and demand for navigation help is so great as the boomer generation enters the unfamiliar terrain of older life.
If you have friends, family or patients in these populations below who you think I might be able to help or if you have questions yourself, please feel free to reach out anytime:
- People in their 50’s, 60’s and 70’s waking up to their own sense of aging – often through illness or other changes in themselves or their loved ones. They seek answers, solutions, and guidance.
- Adult children of aging parents who feel confounded and frustrated about how to best help their parents through a myriad of difficult circumstances. They are the sandwich generation with aging parents, children and often grandchildren too.
- Families where adult children and aging parents need to and want to come to some new understandings and find a closeness now to the extent they can while they can still can.
- People in their 80’s and early 90’s who are facing their last years with all that that entails – memories, regrets, fears, peace and contemplation – all healthy parts of this stage of life. Having a genuinely caring nonjudgmental skilled listener is so valuable.
You might already know that there are very few psychotherapists in Marin who have advance training in gerontology. With my expertise in the fields of aging, communication, business, medicine and psychology, I am uniquely qualified to help your midlife and older patients, friends and family.
My offices are in Mill Valley and San Anselmo. Telephone appointments are also available for people who do not live close by. I provide a free initial phone consultation. And if I can’t help, I can often steer people to other beneficial resources.
With warm wishes for a peaceful 2016,
Nancy Rhine, MS, LMFT, CPG
415-378-6577
nrhine@gmail.com
Soaring Numbers of Adult Children Caring For Aging Parents
According to US News & World Report: “The number of people taking care of an aging parent has soared in the past 15 years. In 1994, only 3 percent of men and 9 percent of women helped provide basic care for a parent. Fifteen years later, 17 percent of men and 28 percent of women provided such care.”
This article also speaks to the importance of creating a sound financial plan to manage assets for sustainability through older life – knowing where you stand money-wise informs your decisions about caregiving, medical, emotional support and other resources. 
So often I see older adult clients who don’t understand what assets they have. As a psychotherapist, I am not a financial adviser. I refer out to trusted local financial planners who work honestly and diligently for clients who have a lot of money and clients who have worked hard but don’t have much extra.
It seems obvious but somehow this gets lost in the shuffle: without knowing exactly how much you have, it isn’t possible to intelligently plan how much you can spend on a personal assistant to help with things like bill-paying, organizing paperwork, balancing checkbooks, driving when you are unable to drive anymore, running errands, doing some light housecleaning, maybe some light meal prep – all of these kinds of tasks that keep us thriving and living in our own homes when we are getting to the place where we can’t do all of these things ourselves.
Another point I feel it’s important to point out is that once you know what you have to work with, there is a WIDE range of creative and available ways to organize care. The range is determined by the spectrum of being able to pay for all outside help to divvying up all the caergiving tasks amongst the adult children whether they are living close by or far away to a combination of those. You have to know where you stand before you can strategize!
Read more about it in The Jerusalem Post article entitled “Your Investments: When Children Take Care of Elderly Parents”.