Episcopal Church Home - Louisville

Family caregivers of seniors with moderate to severe memory loss often struggle to define "meaningful, quality time" with their older loved ones.

How do you communicate with an elder whose mind is being ravaged by Alzheimer's dementia? Do they even know that you're there, let alone know how you feel about them?

When the time comes for your senior loved one to be placed in residential memory care for advanced dementia or Alzheimer's, how can you ease his or her transition to a new senior living community?

How can you reduce your parent's anxiety and ensure that the move goes as smoothly as possible?

Louisville families ask us these questions all the time. Luckily, there are tried-and-true tactics that can help your loved one accomplish the move without feeling fear or disruption.

Let's talk about them today.

Many Louisville families worry about paying for memory care when their older loved ones are diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer's disease.

At Episcopal Church Home, we do our best to help family caregivers understand what they can do to provide for their relatives' care. And our promise, as a person-centered, not-for-profit retirement care organization, is never to ask an ECH resident who has outlived his or her monetary resources to move.

When your older parent is diagnosed with Alzheimer's, what steps should you take? Suddenly, you find yourself thrust into the role of dementia caregiver, which has to be scary for you.

And it's probably equally frightening for your loved one to face the prospect of developing what unfortunately remains a difficult-to-treat, incurable disease. How can you alleviate your parent's fears and make sure that your mom or dad has the care and support he or she needs?

 In our nation's health care system, having proper, up-to-date documentation on file with providers, or having copies ready to provide to first responders, can mean the difference between life or death in an emergency.

Paperwork is also necessary to ensure that every member of your senior loved one's care team — from doctors, nurses and therapists, to the pharmacist, to all the family caregivers who will be helping out — are on the same page and working together.

Thanks to modern medicine, new tech, the availability of taxpayer-funded safety net services like Meals on Wheels, seniors throughout America are aging safely in place longer than ever before.

But, almost invariably, the day comes when no amount of in-home care could provide for all a senior loved one's daily needs. When that day arrives, placement in senior living, a personal care home or a memory care home is the only remaining, safe option.

We all want our senior loved ones to be happy and healthy, so that they can age positively as long as possible.

Positive aging, in fact, is the focus of our parent organization Episcopal Retirement Services' upcoming sold-out TriHealth Refresh Your Soul conference, presented by the Alzheimer's Association of Greater Cincinnati.

As you may have noticed, in preparation for Episcopal Retirement Services' Refresh Your Soul positive aging conference next month in Cincinnati, we've been focusing a lot of attention on ways that seniors can keep themselves healthy and boost their happiness.

Seniors aging in place can't always manage everything alone. Positive aging sometimes requires outside support from community-based services, aging experts, researchers and social safety net programs.

Today, let's take a moment to make you and your loved ones aware of some of the key healthy aging resources available to seniors and their family caregivers here in Louisville.

"Getting older is great!" said few people over the age of 21, ever.

But are most of us wrong? Are there good things about aging that a lot of people overlook?

Turns out, there are. Quite a few, actually. And, today, we're going to talk about them.

As part of our ongoing discussions about healthy aging in the run-up to the Parish Health Ministry's Refresh Your Soul conference, to be held this year on March 12 at Xavier University's Cintas Center in Cincinnati, here are 5 positive aspects of aging:

If there's one question that every senior asks him- or herself, it's how to feel young again. It's long been thought impossible for people to turn back the clock: after all, there is no such thing as the Fountain of Youth.

But that thought is changing, to a certain degree. Although there's very little we can do to arrest our natural, physical decline, our mental, emotional, spiritual and financial wellness needn't suffer as we age.