Every year at Thanksgiving dinner I raise the question with our family and assorted guests—can you name something for which you are thankful? Sometimes it works (mostly with our friends who are too polite to roll their eyes at me) and the responses are no surprise, with folks voicing gratitude for family, friends, health and the like. My own answer is similar, with no shortage of appreciation for a loving husband, a healthy and growing family, wonderful and valued friends and meaningful work

I had the privilege of attending the national conference of LeadingAge last week. LeadingAge represents more than 6,000 nonprofit organizations that serve older adults, primarily those in housing, long term care and senior health services.

There was a lot of conversation at the conference about changing names for some of the existing service models, specifically focused on continuing care retirement communities (CCRC). The term CCRC has been around for a number of years and it describes organizations

For the last ten days I have had the blessing of traveling Israel with seven older adults, the youngest 75 years old and the oldest about to reach 90. It is not an easy thing to travel internationally with seniors. It takes a dedicated team of staff, assigned one to one, and a registered nurse to manage the many medications and health needs. We carry wheelchairs under the bus and we use them, overcoming the less-than-accessible country.

We traveled from the Galilee to Jerusalem and concluded

Recently one of the older adults with whom I am privileged to work started a comment with “If I had known I was going to live this long . . .” He didn’t end it with the old line about “I would have taken better care of myself.” Instead, he said that he would have planned better; he would have thought more about what he was going to do with his life when he was 80 plus years old.

It sparked a longer conversation with both this man as well as a number of his contemporaries

Forgiving — what does it mean?

We all know Alexander Pope’s quote, “to err is human; to forgive divine” and while I am not sure that forgiving is divine, I have come to believe that it is necessary. During the holidays, and specifically at Yom Kippur, forgiveness is really intended to be part of our worship. We are supposed to think about those we have wronged in some way during the year past and ask them to forgive us, repairing the damage as best we can. In

It is the holiday season and many greet the New Year with the joy of family getting together, the opportunity to worship as a community and the chance to both review the year past and think about the year to come. For some, however, holidays can bring up complicated and difficult emotions and be triggers for depression.

Older adults are often at risk for depression because of the inevitable changes and losses they have experienced in life. Some have lost spouses, siblings, children and friends

This week I will note a milestone in my life – maybe not a milestone most people would track, but I am one of those people who retains, and thinks about, dates. The milestone is becoming, this Thursday, older than my mother was when she passed away. She was diagnosed with breast cancer very young – when I was a freshman in high school, and she fought with everything she had, but in the end it was a battle she lost.

She missed so much and I’ve missed, every day, sharing life with

Balance. Some of us talk about it as the struggle to manage our busy personal and professional lives and that’s certainly a relevant use of the term. But when we talk about older adults, balance, in the sense of physical ability, is critical.

It sounds like an easy thing but it is not. Balance involves more than muscles, it also involves our vision; the vestibular system in our inner ear which helps us with knowing “up” and “down” and sensing motion; and something

If you were told that there was a major problem in the United States that affected more than one in ten individuals, would you be concerned? If you knew that there were more than 2.5 million people who were victims of a particular type of crime each year, would you think, “That is a serious problem that needs to be addressed?”

One would think that numbers that staggering would merit some attention, particularly when you recognize that the individuals suffering are all in one age group — individuals

It’s the season of school vacations, travel that is less limited by weather; a time that we often use for reunions, visits and just reconnecting. Families sit around a table or on chairs at the beach and share stories and recollections, and the conversations are often peppered with “Remember the time?” Older adults are often a great source of these stories, telling tales of their own lives, their children’s youth and even what they remember being told by their own parents

Who ever imagined themselves being referred to as an “adult child”? Yet, for many of us with aging parents, that’s a term we have come to understand. We adult children often find ourselves in the position of juggling the competing needs of both children and parents, not always in a way that feels successful. One of the questions we often ask ourselves, and as professionals we often hear, is “How do I know when my parent needs my help?” and “How do I know how to