Caregiving

By Mac McLean

Paid Family and Medical leave will be a high priority for AARP Oregon during the 2019 Legislature.

In homes and communities across the United States, millions of Americans quietly care for older parents, spouses and other loved ones, helping them to stay at home as they age.

You sniff a steaming bowl of tomato soup. Its nose filling heat rises in your nostrils. “Mm! Mm! Good!” you think to yourself. Of course you do. It’s been sneaking into the subterranean of peoples’ minds since the nineteen thirties when Campbell’s soup company broadcast its first radio commercial.

Don’t miss our local, online event for family caregivers.

I spend most of my time at my ALF (Assisted Living Facility). But when my battery-powered wheelchair is charged, I can be found bouncing along the tree-root rutted, bumpy sidewalks, and at a traffic intersection, frenziedly trying to make the walk sign before it runs down to zero seconds. Or I might be lucky enough to have a friend load my wheel chair and me into a car or van for a trip to a coffee shop, a movie, or some other latitudinal or longitudinal location away from the lugubrious ALF.

Eugene, OR – No one denies it. Family caregiving can be tough – but there are plenty of tips and tools available to make this labor of love easier. On Friday, Oct. 26, AARP Oregon and the Alzheimer’s Association are offering a workshop with a twist: the ins and outs of “Family Caregiving for Tough Guys," at Venue 252, 252 Lawrence Street in Eugene.

Two residents died this week. Hey! Wait! That’s exactly how I began a blog in January.

By Merry MacKinnon

In the film version of L. Frank Baum children’s novel , The Wizard of Oz, each of Dorothy’s imagined friends has a burning desire, a craving: they all yearn for some thing (“If I Only Had A….) “The Scarecrow” wants a brain. The “Tin Man” wants a heart. The “Lion” deviates from the anatomical wish list – he wants something amorphous: courage.