Blogging About Elderly Parents

my father walking around our Shiloh neighborhood

on the plane to Israel

Six years ago we had my father living with us for almost a year. I blogged about it a lot. Aliyah To The Land of Israel At 89, Keeping Busy, Arts, Crafts and Exercise, Casting A Shadow, I DID It! The latest episode in the saga of my father's aliyah at 89 and more. In the end, my mother (who was supposed to have joined him in Israel when health permitted) and sister decided that they would be better off in Arizona near my sister, so my son and I took him there. That's where he now is, in a "memory center."

visiting my parents in
Arizona

When he was living with us, I didn't know of any other blogs about taking care of the elderly, coping with dementia and all it entails. Now I follow two blogs about elderly senile (not the modern pc term) parents. One is a very interesting one that combines the saga of the blogger's deteriorating mother with recipes,  The Lost Kitchen: An Alzheimer's Memoir and Cookbook, and the other,  Alzheimer's - My Mom My Hero, which is davka written by a childhood friend of mine. We were even nextdoor neighbors in Great Neck our teens; our parents had been close friends for about forty years beginning in Bell Park Gardens, Bayside, NY, and then until hers moved to Florida.

There are dozens of types of dementia and how it affects the person. No two are identical, though there are patterns and signs that we should be aware of. And sometimes this disability develops so slowly affecting very isolated brain cells that the effect is very subtle and hard and traumatic to recognize.