Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Aging Parents

Sorting through a lifetime's worth of accumulated possessions can be a daunting and stressful process that millions of Americans confront every year. The need to downsize often arises at a momentous life change, whether you're an empty nester or retiree selling your family home, a newlywed blending your households, or cleaning out your parents' property after they've moved into assisted living or passed away. Decluttering guru Peter Walsh knows the difficulty of downsizing firsthand.

In the past century, average life expectancies have nearly doubled, and today, for the first time in human history, many people have a realistic chance of living to 80 or beyond. As life expectancy increases, Americans need accurate, scientifically grounded information so that they can take full responsibility for their own latter years. In The Art and Science of Aging Well, Mark E. Williams, MD, discusses the remarkable advances that medical science has made in the field of aging and the steps that people may take to enhance their lives as they age.

The older adult population is growing by leaps and bounds. Dramatic lifestyle changes, along with growing health problems, have led many to turn to alcohol, prescription painkillers, and marijuana to medicate their physical and psychic pain. You may think, "Dad is just enjoying cocktails and retirement" or "Mom still has pain and needs her pills". Maybe so, but consider that an estimated 17 percent of people aged 60-plus struggle with substance misuse and addiction.

Just after midnight on October 9, 2017, as one of the nation's deadliest firestorms swept over California's Wine Country, hundreds of elderly residents from two posh senior living facilities were caught in its path. The frailest were blind, in wheelchairs, or diagnosed with dementia, and their community quickly transformed from a palatial complex that pledged to care for them to one that threatened to entomb them. The rescue of the final 105 seniors left behind on an inflamed hillside depended not on employees, but strangers whose lives intersected in a riveting tale of terror and heroism.

Millions of Americans are in an active caregiver role or will be in one in the future, yet few have a solid plan for the inevitable challenges of aging. Whether your parents are in their sixties or their nineties, and whether they have years of health ahead of them or already need more support, Successfully Navigating Your Parents' Senior Years provides the framework and information you need to prepare for and handle with confidence the changes ahead.

In this book, author and biologist Marcy Houle shares her personal journey of caring for her father, a surgeon, who developed Alzheimer's disease, and later her mother, who succumbed to other medical conditions.Like many children of aging parents, Marcy often felt powerless traveling this sad trajectory - watching them fall through the cracks of a fragmented and confusing healthcare system, where professionals often wrote off their symptoms as "just old age".