Elder Care

Practicing

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400

Taking piano lessons, learning to speak Russian, seeking enlightenment

Struck

tfd3@psu.edu — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400

I often wonder if there was something I missed, if the thunder and lightning said something I couldn’t understand.

Dear Old Dad

Fri, 30 May 2025 12:00:00 -0400

What would Young Dad think about Old Dad? Young Dad: professional Alpine ski racer, multi–Emmy Award–winning sports cameraman, and documentary filmmaker—handsome, tan, rugged, jovial. Young Dad, steering the outboard motorboat to Sandpiper Island in Maine, zipping around town in his burgundy Saab, flying around the world for work. Young Dad, skillfully extracting our splinters, icing our bruises, reassuring us about hurricanes and heartbreak.

If Young Dad met Old Dad—hunched, plodding along the beach in water shoes and a straw sun hat, arguing in favor of gluing a live snail onto an art project—Young Dad would have been nice to the old guy. He would have gone out of his way for a chat. But if he discovered the old guy was him, I know exactly what he would have said: You gotta be fucking kidding me.

Chores

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

On a solo backpacking trip, in a desert military base, at a church revival

Shaving

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 -0400

A teenage rite of passage, a prison barber, a husband’s unfamiliar face

My Mother’s Disease Introduces Me to My Mother

michaelmark3@gmail.com — Thu, 30 May 2024 00:02:00 -0400

My mother’s disease wants / to know my name. // My mother’s disease takes / me in // with my mother’s eyes.

Sunbeams

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

There are only four kinds of people in this world: those who have been caregivers, those who currently are caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.

Rosalynn Carter, quoting a caregiver colleague

Home Sick

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Once we start to recognize that most of us will, at some point, have to step out of our professional role to provide care, then we have to transform how we’re running our economies. At the moment, our economies are relying on these hidden tragedies that befall women behind closed doors. All to keep the wheels of industry turning.

Speak, Memory

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 05:00:00 -0500

Askey: How do you think we will look back on our current treatment of people with dementia?

Harper: I think we will see how incomplete our approach was: The obsession with a cure. The overuse of psychotropic medications to “manage distressing behaviors.” Only something like 10 percent of that is necessary, research shows. A lot of those psychotropic medications are dangerous for people living with dementia.

Care Warning

Wed, 31 May 2023 04:05:00 -0400

Take care of yourself during this essay, whatever that means for you. Perhaps you need to drink a lot of water or unwrap a snack (quietly please!) or play Angry Birds on your phone — whatever works to tamp down your discomfort.

Someone To Listen

Fri, 01 Nov 2019 00:00:00 -0400

The first time he calls the talk line, it’s because he wants to die. Whatever has happened in his brain has made him a stranger to himself.

Telling Time

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 00:00:00 -0400

We rent a condominium together, my eighty-six-year-old widowed mother and I. Sometimes she summons me from her bedroom at the end of the hall. I have learned to guess from her tone what it is she wants.

The Wayward Daughter

Sun, 01 Oct 2017 00:00:00 -0400

I’m at my father’s bedside, his hand resting in mine. His skin feels thin, but his nails grow thick and long, creeping a half inch beyond the rounded flesh. They’re the only part of him that seems healthy. How can the nails keep growing like this when his heart pumps barely enough blood to keep him alive?

What Love Looks Like From Here

Wed, 01 Feb 2017 00:00:00 -0500

We’ve been married nearly forty years, but we are still learning from my parents what love looks like: How it moves. All the shapes it takes. Though my parents can no longer care for themselves, they care for each other.

A Good Daughter

Sat, 01 Oct 2016 00:00:00 -0400

But what daughter wouldn’t be unnerved by such foreshadowings of the time when her mother won’t be able to take care of herself; when she will have to be cooked for, spoon-fed, helped out of bed, cleaned in the most private of ways? You want your mother to be there to take care of you, to wipe away a smudge with her spit, to make you dinner, to catch you before you fall.

The Exegesis Of Eating

Sat, 01 Jun 2002 00:05:00 -0400

And thou shalt treat the food that touches thy lips with reverence, in recognition of the labors and traditions of thine ancestors, and in communion and fellowship with those to whom thou art tied with bonds of blood and love.

Extraordinary Measures

Sat, 01 Dec 2001 00:30:00 -0500

My trailer shudders in the relentless prairie wind. Despite insulating tape on the pipes that run beneath it and the space heater I’ve put down the well pit, the water has been frozen solid for five days. Drafts force their way past the sheets of plastic I stretched over the windows back in October. When the furnace runs, the trailer is warm enough, but as soon as it shuts off, cold creeps out from the walls to take over the center of my rooms. Somehow I endure, crawling out from under my pile of quilts to start my truck every few hours so that the oil doesn’t freeze, or to carry buckets of water up the hill from the hydrant by the shed.

Last Day At Lemon Acres

Sun, 01 Dec 1996 00:00:00 -0500

At 4:30 that afternoon Jack was sitting up in a chair, his polished, old man’s legs crossed, eyes staring intently at the floor. My heart turned a little pirouette: it was the first time he’d been out of bed on his own in six weeks.

Why I Like Dead People

Fri, 01 Nov 1985 00:00:00 -0500

I like dead bodies: at no other time am I so aware of my own animation. This isn’t because I am lucky and this poor fool is not, but because here before me is the mute, incontrovertible evidence. Some force drives these shells, and it drives me still. I am a witness, an attestant, to a foresworn truth.