Saving the Family Jewels
One fairly long (over a year) Caregiver stint for a loved one and the family assets could all go….
Caregivers Talk
Come to my informative talk and be ready for the role you’ll probably take on, as Caregiver, in your lifetime.
The Disease That Stalks My Family
It’s a rapacious predator who has taken far too many of my family. Just in the past 9 months, my two brothers passed, due to this illness. John Jr., at the age of 79, passed last August and Peter, 82, died more recently. John was buried on the Cape one month ago and Pete is…
A Yard Quilt of Memory
When one is younger, she (I give the preference to “she” because I can’t speak for men) doesn’t really consider memory, because she doesn’t have many memories in her cognitive vault. She’ll build them over a lifetime, with some being wonderful and some (hopefully not too many) painful. My friend, Jackie Damian, once spoke about…
Burial at Berry….
It was as still as could be in Berry Cemetery (yes, someone knew that name would get a reaction), off a dirt road in Denmark, Maine, where I’d gone this past Saturday, in June, to be part of the funeral assembly for my latest cousin who’d gone the route of Alzheimer’s. The sound of the…
Paul Wesley Gates and Colleen Mellor Marry After 33 Years
Mark Patinkin, a top journalist at Rhode Island’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Providence Journal, interviewed me and wrote up Paul’s and my story about our wedding this past December 16, 2023. He found our story intriguing—the kind in which others would be interested. We were 83 and 78 years of age and we’d been together in an…
Az and Me: A Partner’s Journey with Alzheimer’s
I Begin New Life as an Az Advocate At one time, I considered becoming a lawyer. Why? I love advocating for people wronged by others…the system…inadequacies of the law, etc. But, earlier in my life, I couldn’t invest in the time requirements to realize that goal, since I was a single working mom. So, my…
A Lesson My Aging Mother Taught Me
It had been brutally hot that summer. And throughout the state, towns and cities baked in the sun’s punishing rays. My mother’s half acre, bordering the West Warwick/Coventry line, was parched and arid but that didn’t stop her from hiring two sketchy-looking individuals to prune the forsythia bushes on her property. Why? She intended…
